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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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1 1885 



ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 



WAYLAND HOYT, D. D., 

AUTHOR OF " HINTS AND HELPS FOR THE CHRISTIAN LIFE," *' PRESENT 
LESSONS FROM DISTANT DAYS," " GLEAMS FROM PAUL'S PRISON." 




PHILADELPHIA : 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 
1420 Chestnut Street. 



\ 



■\ 




Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the j^earl885, by the 

AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY, 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PREFACE. 



For the half-hours, the bits of leisure along 
the pilgrimage, this little book is meant. If for 
any pilgrim it shall make the way more evident, 
or give courage, or gird with fresher strength, 
or soothe the weariness a little, or guard from 
danger, I shall be glad and thankful. 

Wayland Hoyt. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE. 

Preparatory Years 7 

When God Helps 18 

Test of Love 26 

Personal Influence 32 

Misinterpretation 42 

Doing Good 48 

Contact with Jesus 57 

Where the Church Stands 63 

A Lesson from the Lilies 68 

Holding Power 71 

Character and Trial 76 

The Best Last 84 

Faith 88 

Prayer 96 

Prayer and Faith 104 

Faith and Results 110 

Doubt 115 

Resources 124 

Waiting on the Lord 130 

Idolizing 135 



b CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

Concerning Sin 141 

Divine Kemedy for Sin 146 

Christ the Light 151 

True Self-Interest 156 

Conquering the Promise 161 

Prayer Denied yet Answered 168 

Eesource in Trouble 180 

All Things Working Together for Good.. 185 

The Men Needed 192 

How to be a Christian 197 

Divine Love 200 

Moral Disinclination 209 

Increase 218 

"The Sundays of Man's Life" 230 

Success 233 

The Inner Spring 237 

God's Method 244 

Grieving the Spirit 247 

The Fading Leaf 252 

Christ and the Grave 260 



ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 



PKEPARATORY YEAES. 

THE question is, What practical suggestions 
for ourselves may we find in the prepara- 
tory years of Jesus? These suggestions surely 
among others. 

There is in these preparatory years a sugges- 
tion of the intimate and vital sympathy of the Lord 
Jesus with all tired men and women, with all long- 
ing and waiting men and women. 

Certainly that is a most blessed Scripture : 
" For we have not an High Priest which cannot 
be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; 
but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet 
without sin." And what luminous commentary 
on this great Scripture is afforded by these pre- 
paratory years ! 



8 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

For, under what strain of toil are people held 
in this world of ours ! " If I ever reach 
heaven, I think I shall do nothing for the first 
thousand years but rest," said a tired woman. 
Bending over sewing-machines; tasked with 
children; bowing beneath burdens of business; 
delving; building; searching in studious thought; 
anxious, too, about the results and proceeds of 
their toil ; wondering whether they can make the 
ends of years buckle together; thinking how 
they can feed the hungry demands clamoring on 
every side, — what multitudes of men and women 
are strained and tired thus ! 

And in just this sometimes tasking tyranny of 
toil, their Lord stands with them as he went 
toiling on through the preparatory years. Though 
he w^as not a father, he knew parental cares and 
burdens. The strong probability is that Joseph 
died long before Jesus touched the verge of a 
young manhood ; and so on him came the re- 
sponsibilities of the family provision. And Hol- 
man Hunt is right, when in that great picture, 
" The Shadow of the Cross," he makes our Lord 



PREPARATORY YEARS. 9 

assume an attitude of one utterly wearied with a 
long day's toil. 

And then how waiting is the common case of 
multitudes in this world of ours! How fre- 
quently the promise of some rich result now to 
be caught, held, delighted in, spoken to our ear, 
is broken to our hope ! How often deferred hope 
makes sick hearts ! How often there is a feeling 
in us of something loftier, nobler, we ought to do, 
we long to do, we mean to do, even as such feel- 
ing stirred in the heart of the boy Jesus in the 
Temple ! And then, how the feeling seems caged 
and crowded down and baffled by the narrow 
place in which it is given us to stand ; and we 
must wait ! 

There is a very noble sermon by a great 
preacher on the " Withheld Completions of Life.'^ 
How the title of the sermon tells life's common 
story ! How like is life to a garden of buds w^hich 
tardily come to bloom, if, indeed, they come to 
bloom at all ! And w^e — how long and real, and 
often even tragically sad, the ache of the waiting 
for the blooming ! 



10 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Bunyan waiting for the opening of the gates 
of Bedford jail ; Judson waiting for the first eon- 
vert, as he toiled there at the leveling of the 
black, awful mountain of Eastern Heathenism ; 
Morse waiting for a little help that he might 
string his telegraph wires from Washington to 
Baltimore, and show men how he had found a 
road along which the lightning would travel with 
docility, and lend its swiftness to the transmis- 
sion of men's thoughts — ah, how much of life 
is consumed in waiting, and how hard the wait- 
ing: is and strangle ! 

And now our Lord comes to stand himself 
wath us in our waiting. Lo ! eighteen years went 
widening on between that youthful prophetic 
feeling in the Temple and the fulfillment and 
actualization of the feeling in the public and 
active duties of Messiahship. And, compared 
with the whole brief space of the active life of 
Jesus, how long that waiting ! 

Ah, what help here for tired people and for 
waiting people! The Christ, a Christ of toil; 
the Christ, a Christ of waiting. How easy and 



PREPARATORY YEARS. 11 

how reasonable to cry into the heart of such close 
sympathy : 

Be near us when we climb or fall ; 
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours, 
With larger, other eyes than ours, 

To make allowance for us all. 

There is in these preparatory years of Jesus a 
suggestion of the high dignity of what we call 
lowly service. 

Just a poor cube of stone and plaster, lighted 
by the door, possibly by a single window, with a 
room serving at once for work-room, for kitchen, 
for bedroom, having for furniture a mat, some 
cushions on the ground, one or two earthen ves- 
sels, and perhaps a painted chest. I am sure the 
poorest of us would call it a very poor and meager 
way of living. Vast difference between such 
home and the golden streets of heaven and the 
throne of the Highest, before which the shining 
hosts fall in worship, and toward which they 
send rolling on the vast volume of their praises. 
And in that room the Lord of heaven, with his 
hands roughened with humble toil, his brow 



12 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

beaded with the sweat of lowly industry, his 
back burdened with the weight of common and 
earthly care ! Only a Galilean carpenter, only 
a carpenter of Nazareth, the meanest town of 
Galilee, the Only Begotten of the Divine Father ; 
and yet there, at that lowly work and in that 
lowly life, engaged about the Father's business ! 

How often does it happen that we grow dis- 
satisfied with our daily work, and fretful at that 
which is given us to do! That which makes up 
the common and routine life seems frequently so 
insignificant; buying, selling, learning, teach- 
ing, preaching, tending children, caring about the 
ten thousand infinitesimals that gather around 
the family. We long for a higher sphere. We 
pant for loftier and larger place. We say to 
ourselves : " My life is being wasted where I am ; 
it is becoming worn into useless shreds; it is 
going for nothing." 

We want to do some large business for the 
great Father ; and, before we know it, thinking 
thus with ourselves, we are bitter with discontent 
and unnerved with despondency; and jealousy 



PREPARATORY YEARS. 13 

toward those who seem to be doing nobler work 
than we poisons and sours all the springs of life. 

But Christ was doing the Father's business 
there at Nazareth, following his trade of carpen- 
ter and providing for the necessities of Mary's 
household, just as really as when, afterward, he 
preached the Sermon on the Mount, or raised 
Lazarus from the dead. 

There is such a thing as lofty dignity in what 
we call lowly service. Oh ! to learn this lesson 
and put it into practice. Oh! to enter into 
the divine philosophy of life, and understand 
how it is never so much what we do. as the spirit 
ill which lue do it, which constitutes it really 
divine service, the Father's business. Oh I to be 
able to make work worship, and to know how to 
write above the driest, dustiest task, "For thy 
sake, O Father!" 

A servant with this clause, 

Makes drudgery divine ; 
Who sweeps a room as for God's laws 

Makes that and th' action fine. 

There is in these preparatory years of Jesus a 



14 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

suggestion as to the way of entrance into a Nobler 
Future, 

Pity the man or woman before whose vision 
there does not pass and flash an ideal, putting to 
shame the actual, and stirring longings irrepres- 
sible toward its actualization. Such are to grow 
as trees do ; they are not to be content to hug 
the earth, but they are all the time to stand 
with firmer trunk, flinging out more multitu- 
dinous branches to the breeze, and reaching up 
further toward the sun. 

The what-is, however fair and bright, ought 
never to be but as the dim prophecy of the 
what-is-to-be. 

The Galilean carpenter may not remain only 
a Galilean carpenter. He misses the doing the 
Father's business, if he remain such. 

But this is the question : How may we enter 
a better future? How shall the present be made 
but a prophecy, which shall fulfill itself in a 
nobler to-come? Let me speak it reverently. 
How shall the boy of twelve, doing the Father's 
business there in Nazareth, rise into the business 



PREPARATORY YEARS. 15 

appropriate for the man of thirty, and accom- 
plish it as Teacher of the people, in Gethsemane, 
on the cross ? 

Here is a clerk on a narrow salary, driven 
with work, pinched in pocket, and at the beck 
of others. Visions of a future pass before him, 
of a brighter time, of a commanding influence, 
of the largeness of a competence. Right. It is 
the safety of the boot-black on the street, that he 
hopes one day to be a millionaire. Find the boy 
before whom no such hope flashes, and you may 
at once put him amcmg your dangerous classes. 
But how shall the poor clerk rise? Through 
driveling and carelessness, through the refusal to 
honestly earn his little pay because now he can 
get no better? That is the road downward, not 
upward. 

We can only do larger work for the Father in 
the future as we are faithful in doing smaller 
work for him in the present. It was Jesus, 
faithful to the Father's business in the carpen- 
ter's shop, who was faithful to the Father's busi- 
ness on the cross. It is the faithful doino- of 



16 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

what is small that shall lead us into the capacity 
and possibility of doing what is great. For an 
act is not something simply done. When a tree 
•folds forth a leaf, it is not simply that another 
leaf is waving in the air. From the deepest 
rootlet up to the topmost branch on which that 
leaf is swinging, the tree is stronger. 

Acts are the folding forth of character; and 
as the act is bad or good, well done or ill, is the 
character stronger and fitter for higher ends, or 
deteriorated and nearer destruction. 

The boy doing the Father's business at twelve 
did the Father's loftier business at thirty, because 
he did the Father's lowlier business at twelve. 

I count this thing to be grandly true ; 
That a noble deed is a step toward God, 
Lifting the soul from the common sod 

To a purer air and a broader view. 

We rise by things that are under our feet, 
By what we have mastered of good and gain, 
By the pride deposed and the passion slain, 

And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet. 

Heaven is not reached at a single bound ; 
But we build the ladder by which we rise 
From the lowly earth to the vaulted skies ; 

And we mount to its summit round by round. 



PREPARATORY YEARS. 17 

And lest your life should seem to you nothing 
but a preparation in the faithful doing of lowly 
and little things ; lest you should think you can 
never rise to any nobler future of lordlier service ; 
lest you should say there can never be for me in 
life any higher destiny than that, with horny 
hand, I grasp the tools of w^hat men call a com- 
mon handicraft, — then remember that this life 
of ours is but the poor and meager vestibule of 
life's real transcendent temple, and that faithful- 
ness here is preparation for glorious ability and 
infinite reward there. " Behold I come quickly, 
to give unto every man according as his ivoi^k 
shall be.'' We are justified by faith ; but in 
that heaven which we reach along the path of 
faith we are rewarded according: to our works. 



WHEN GOD HELPS. 

rpHINK a little of the passage of the Israel- 
-*- ites across the raging torrent of the Jordan. 
It is full of suggestion concerning when and how 
divine help may be expected. 

The Israelites were to go forth. They were 
not to wait to think about it. They were not to 
promise they would try, and go down to the 
Jordan, and look at it, and perhaps wade in a 
little way to feel how deep and swift the waters 
were, and then to hurry back to camp and dry 
themselves, and say they had tried and could 
not. They were not to enter into scientific cal- 
culation of the width and deepness of the river 
before they should go forth. They were not first 
to determine to understand just how God was 
going to help them over — the method and the 
mechanism of this assistance. They were abso- 
lutely and unreservedly to commit themselves to 
18 



WHEN GOD HELPS. 19 

this crossing over. They were to break up their 
camp on the eastern side of Jordan. They 
were to move onward. They were to veritably 
march toward that raging flood. 

Also, they were to go forth according to direG- 
Hon, They were not to rush on in a hap-hazard, 
irregular, pellmell way. They were to go forth 
marshaled. Before them the priests and Levites 
w^ere to bear the sacred ark. Between the ark 
and the ordered hosts was to be kept a space of 
two thousand cubits — about three-quarters of a 
mile — so that the ark could be held in the full 
view of all of them, none crowding in to shut off 
from any this symbol and certainty of God's 
presence with them. When the Israelites saw 
the ark of the covenant of the Lord their God, 
and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then they 
were to remove from their places and go after it 
in this regulated, commanded way, and in no 
other. 

Also, they were to go forth m faith in the 
promise. This \vas to be the reason of their 
going forth — this and nothing other, their faith 



20 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

in the promise. They had a promise for their 
going forth. " And it shall come to pass," said 
Joshua, " as soon as the soles of the feet of the 
priests that bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord 
of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the 
Jordan, that the waters of the Jordan shall be 
cut off from the waters that come down from 
above, and they shall stand upon a heap." 

The Israelites were to go forth believing that 
promise; so believing it that they were willing 
and ready to risk themselves upon it. They 
were to fight their skepticism with the promise. 
They were to smite down their anxious question- 
ings with the weapon of the promise. They were 
to lay low their scientific and theological won- 
derings as to how it could be, as to how it could 
come to pass, by the cleaving sword-edge of the 
promise. They had nothing else. They were to 
expect nothing else. They had no experience of 
any previous crossing that Jordan in such a way. 
" For ye have not passed this way heretofore," 
said Joshua. But they did have the promise, 
and they were to lay grip by faith upon that. 



WHEN GOD HELPS. 21 

And so these Israelites did go forth. Beyond, 
raged and rioted the Jordan. They marched on. 
Still swept on the river, freshet-filled to its 
utmost brim. They marched on. There is no 
lessening of the volume of the waters ; still do 
the waves plunge on triumphantly; nothing 
could live amidst them ; there is not the slightest 
sign that they are held in curb by the divine 
hand. Still they march on. I wonder if they 
did not question with each other. I think they 
must have done it, because they were men and 
women like ourselves. Perhaps they said to 
each other, "There is no sign; those raging 
waves are just as terrible; they would sweep 
away and drown us all — our wives and our little 
children — if we were once caught in their wild 
w^^ap ; I wonder, if the waters are going to 
subside, why they do not begin it ; but they do 
not ; this is getting terrible ; this is a great strain 
for faith." I think it not unlikely that they 
talked thus to each other because it was a strain 
for faith. They were men and women like 
ourselves. 



22 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

And yet they have still faith enough in the 
promise to keep moving on toward the Jordan, 
and they do still march on. 

But now the priests bearing Jehovah's ark 
have reached the margin. See, still, they go on 
unfalteringly. See again, the wild waters lave 
their feet as they touch the river's brink. And 
now, as that water touches their feet only, how 
strange and wonderful the sight! God's hand 
has surely caught those raging floods. They 
stop. They pile themselves on one side in a 
massive, watery wall, and the water still in the 
channel of the river hastens onward, to lose 
itself in the salt waves of the Dead Sea. The 
channel is disclosed. It is bare, utterly. It is a 
safe crossing. Now the priests bearing Jehovah's 
ark move onward to take their stand in the 
middle of the channel. For the whole host the 
crossing is easy now. On either side the ark, 
they stream onwards and they stream over. In 
a few hours they have safely crossed. They are 
all in Canaan. 

When, then, does God help us? When we, 



WHEN GOD HELPS. 23 

actually going forth in duty as he has told us, 
according to the directions he has given, laying 
hold by faith upon his promise, come to the limit 
of our strength — when thus our feet are dipped 
in the brim of the waters of our Jordan, his 
great help does come. 

It comes in difficult duty. Duty — that is some- 
thing due ; due — that is something owed ; owed 
— that is something one ought. You are con- 
scious of this feelino; of ouo^htness. But it is 
something difficult, like that Jordan. Notwith- 
standing, go forth, as God has ordered, in the 
faith of his promise, and help shall fall. 

It comes scattering foreboded sorrow. Do you 
not remember how the women, going to the 
sepulchre asked anxiously, " Who shall roll away 
the stone?" but going on, even though the great 
stone crossed their pathway, found it rolled away ? 

It comes in death. Mr. Greatheart was tellinof 
Mr. Honest of Mr. Fearing, whom, after the 
king's direction, he had guided to the celestial 
city. Said Mr. Greatheart, " Mr. Fearing Avas 
one that played upon the bass; I have heard 



24 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

that he lay roaring at the Slough of Despond 
for above a month together ; nor durst he, for all 
he saw several go over before him, venture, 
though they, many of them, offered to lend him 
their hands. He would not go back neither. 
* The celestial city,' he said, — ' he should die if 
he came not to it.' And yet he was dejected at 
every difficulty, and stumbling at every straw 
that any one cast in his way. Well, after he 
had lain at the Slough of Despond awhile, as I 
told you, one sunshiny morning, I do not know 
how, he ventured, and so got over ; but when he 
^^^as over, he would scarcely believe it. But 
when he was come to the river where there was 
no bridge, there again he was in a heavy case. 
Now, now, he said, he should be drowned forever, 
and so never see that face in comfort that he had 
come so many miles to behold. And here also," 
continued Mr. Greatheart, " I took notice of what 
w^as very remarkable, — the water of that river 
tvas lower at this time than I ever saw it in all my 
life^ so he went over at last not much above wet- 
shod." 



WHEN GOD HELPS. 25 

Also look at this truth of the divine help in 
the direction of conversion. There is that Jordan 
of belief in Jesus, of the absolute commitment 
of the self to him which we must pass before we 
can enter the Canaan of forgiveness, and God's 
fovor, and the noble life. Now go on toward it. 
Cross it. But you have no feeling, you say; 
that is not to the matter. But you do not know 
such feeling as other people say they have ; that 
is not to the matter. But you do not understand 
how it can be ; you need not ; that is not to the 
matter. But you are not fit to make the cross- 
ing ; you never will be fitter ; that is not to the 
matter. This is enough. God tells you to go 
forth. " Except a man be born again, he cannot 
see the kingdom of God.'' God tells you the 
way : " Him that cometh unto me." God gives 
you his promise : " I will not cast out." Go 
forth, then, along his w^ay in faith of his promise; 
and when your feet but touch the brim of a 
perfect self-surrender, you are his, you are Chris- 
tian. His forgiveness falls, you have passed into 

the Canaan of the new life. 
3 



TEST OF LOVE. 

"inVERMORE the Test of Love is Seriice. 
-^-^ "Simon Peter, lovest thou me?" asked 
Jesns. " Lord, thou knowest all things ; thou 
knowest that I love thee." " Serve me then," 
said Jesus ; " feed my lambs ; shepherd ray 
sheep ; feed my little sheep." 

Service is the test which discriminates the 
empty and idle sentimentality of love from the 
actuality and noble stringency of it. 

This is the commonest of truths, and yet it is 

a truth of which in religion we need constantly 

to be reminded. There in that great poem of 

Spenser's " Faerie Queen," when the brave knight 

who attended the gentle lady and protected her 

and fought for her, w^as sadly wounded in the 

conflict in her behalf, and then when she gave 

herself to utmost care for him, and stained her 

fair white fingers with the blood issuing from his 
26 



TEST OF LOVE. 27 

wounds, and, to those remonstrating with her 
that she should thus stain and redden lier beau- 
tiful fairness, it is a touch true to nature when 
Spenser makes her reply, "Entire affection 
hateth nicer hands." 

Of 420urse that is a touch true to nature. You 
recognize it such at once. That is not love ; it 
is only the sickly sham and sentimentality and 
semblance of it, which will refuse to do hard 
things for the object of its affection. An entire 
affection always "hateth nicer hands." Its 
thought is not of self, except as self can use 
itself in any sort of service for the object of love. 

Well, that which is true of a real love every- 
where, is just as true of a real religious love. 
That is not a religious love whose hands are 
too nice to be lent to strenuous, difficult, even 
painful service. 

She was a heathen convert. She was a solitary 
lamp burning in that darkness. She had her 
Testament, and that was all — no church, no 
school, no Christian friend. But when the great 
missionary, Moffat, came to that village on the 



28 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

banks of the Orange Eiver, in South Africa, and 
when the heathen people of the village roughly 
bade him and his companions, hungry and 
thirsty and tired, halt at a distance, and would 
sell them neither food nor water, and when this 
poor black convert brought them milk, and 
water, and flesh, and wood for fire, sobbing out, 
as the tears rolled down her dark cheeks, " I 
love him whose you are, and surely it is my duty 
to give you a cup of cold water in his name ; my 
heart is full, therefore I cannot speak the joy I 
feel in this out-of-the-world place ; '* why, then 
this poor black convert gave the real test of the 
love she bore her Lord in service to those who 
loved him also, in service for him rendered to 
them. Of course, you say, that is true ; I 
believe in her ; she w^as a true convert, because 
she had true love, and she manifested the test 
for love in service. 

And the test for love is even difficfidt service. 
Certainly that is not a masterful love which is 
hindered in its service by difficulty. Certainly it 
would not always be easy for Peter to shepherd 



TEST OF LOVE. 29 

Christ's sheep. Sometimes, the sheep would be 
wandering and unruly, and straying into for- 
bidden places, to be gone after in self-denying 
journeying, and to be won back by pains and 
prayers. Certainly it would not always be easy 
for Peter to find Christ's little sheep. Sometimes 
youth is boisterous, and impatient of control, and 
defiant of authority ; and Peter must draw the 
rein on his own natural impetuosity and quick 
temper, and be self-controlled, and loving, and 
strongly gentle. It was not very easy service 
which Christ made the test of Peter's love. But 
love which will not take hold of even jagged 
duty, is no love, in the sense Christ meant, when 
he said, " Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?" 

He professes to love, but he gave up his Sun- 
day-school class because he could not see that he 
was doing much good in it. He was not willing 
to sow patiently for the sake of Christ, and trust 
him for the reaping. I wonder if action and 
reason like that were evidence of a true love. 

He professes to love, but he gave up his class 

because his scholars worried him, it was hard 
3^^ 



30 ALONG THE PILGRIIMAGE. 

Avork to interest them, and he did not like the 
hard work for Christ's sake. I wonder if action 
and reason like that were evidence of a true love. 

He professes to love, but he gave up his class 
because the superintendent unintentionally hurt 
his feelings ; he did not think it pleasant ; and 
he did not like to endure unpleasantness for 
Christ's sake. I wonder if action and reason 
like that were evidence of a true love ! 

He professes to love, but he gave up his class 
because he did not get just the place he wanted 
in the school, and so thought himself passed by 
and underrated. He could not work in a lowly 
place for Christ. I wonder if action and reason 
like that were evidence of a true love. 

He professes to love, and really he can teach, 
he has pecaliar gifts for teaching, he has time, 
his Lord has variously blessed him much, but he 
will not teach. He likes too well a vacant Sun- 
day afternoon ; or he has graduated from such 
work now in his later years; or he wants to 
indulge himself in something which would not 
set a good example for his scholars, should he 



TEST OF LOVE. 81 

teach ; or he has an undefined disinclination, for 
which he cannot or does not want to assign 
definite reason. Oh, I wonder if action and 
reason like these are evidence of a true love I 

And all the time the test of love is service, 
can be nothing else. '' Do you love the Saviour, 
son of Jonas ? " says Jesus ; " then do something 
for me ; feed my lambs, shepherd my sheep, ^eed 
my little sheep." 

Ah, it is solemn truth. If to our protestation 
of love we do not respond in some real service, 
then our love is pinchbeck, it is counterfeit, it is 
mimicry, it is simulation, it is travesty, it is 
seeming, it is sham — it is not Love. 



PEESONAL INFLUENCE. 

rriHEKE is a kind of hidden truth in what 

-*- the Scripture tells us of the relation of 

John the Baptist with his disciples, which a little 

explanation will bring out, and which, when 

brought out, is most suggestive. 

John the Baptist, you will remember, was a 

great and controlling preacher. His intense, 

awakening words stirred all Judea into attention. 

To the Jordan bank, which was his pulpit ; to the 

wilderness, which was his sanctuary — the people 

crowded. Everywhere, in every one's heart, 

there was longing and w^aiting for some great 

new deliverer. The people believed that they 

were standing at the ending point of prophecy ; 

that in some other and new w^ay God would 

break his silence and speak to them by the 

tongue of his Messiah. 

The stir in the wilderness caused answering 
(32) 



PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 33 

stir among religious leaders at Jerusalem. Per- 
haps this original and heart-awakening prophet 
might be himself Messiah. The Sanhedrim 
choose a deputation to visit John, that they may 
question him and satisfy themselves. "This is 
the record of John, when the Jews sent priests 
and Levites to Jerusalem to ask him. Who art 
thou ? And he confessed and denied not, but 
confessed, I am not the Christ. And they asked 
What then, art thou Elias? And he saith, I am 
not." He really was the prophet who in the 
twilight before Messiah's rising was to stand for 
the old, grim, strong Elijah. The prophet 
Malachi had declared that Elijah was to come 
just before Messiah. The Lord Jesus afterward 
distinctly said that John the Baptist was the 
Elijah foretold by Malachi, and rightfully ex- 
pected by the people. I suppose the true expla- 
nation is, as some one else has suggested, that, 
like any other great but humble messenger of 
God, John the Baptist did not comprehend his 
own character and mission in relation to ancient 
prophecy. He was more than he thought he 



34 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

was. It is vastly better to be more than you 
think you are, than to think yourself more than 
you are. God's best servants are always those 
who are careless about great names and places 
for themselves — who think first and chiefest of 
doing God's work and will in the places in which 
he has given them to stand. In one of Robert 
Browning's poems, the angel Gabriel is imagined 
taking the place of a poor earth-born boy, 
because it was God's will that he should do it ; 
and in this way the poet sings about the angel : 

Then to his poor trade he turned, 
By which his daily bread was earned; 
And ever o'er the trade he bent, 
And ever on the earth content. 
He did God's will. To him all one 
If on the earth or in the sun. 

For you see, when you come to the true thought 
about it, the place of God's will is heaven, 
whether it is down here or up yonder. 

Then this committee from the Sanhedrim went 
on to ask John the Baptist, ''Art thou that 
prophet ? " And he answered, " No." The Jews 
expected a prophet, other than Elijah, who 



PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 35 

should precede the Messiah ; which expectation 
was based on a certain prediction in Deuter- 
onomy. They made a mistake in their interpret- 
tation. "Where Moses speaks of a prophet whom 
God should raise up from the midst of them 
like unto Moses, and unto whom they should 
hearken, they thought Moses was referring to some 
prophet other than the blessed Messiah himself, to 
whom the prophecy did refer really. When the 
prophecy has been matched by its fulfillment, it is 
easy then to see the matching ; and as a proof 
that "holy men of old spake as they were moved 
by the Holy Ghost," your fulfilled prophecy 
becomes a proof immensely strong. But it is a 
difl[icult and dano^erous thins^ to look into an 
itnfidfilled prophecy and say it means precisely 
this and this, and it is going to come to its ful- 
fillment precisely so, and precisely then. Let us 
beware of doing that concerning the commotions 
in our world, concerning the second coming of 
our Lord. We are to believe in the second 
coming of our Lord — that, unfulfilled prophecy 
distinctly asserts ; but precisely how, and pre- 



36 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

cisely when, it is not given us to know; and 
concerning it, it is very dangerous for us to make 
assertion. 

Well, this committee reply to John : " Who art 
thou, that we may give an ans\Yer to them that 
sent us? What sayest thou of thyself?" And 
then John answers : " About all that I know 
about myself is that I am somehow the fulfill- 
ment of Isaiah's prophecy of a voice that should 
come crying in the wilderness, ' Make straight 
the way of the Lord.' I am sure the Messiah is 
coming; I am sure there are multitudes of 
things that ought to be straightened for his 
coming. This is who I am, and all I am. I am 
the voice crying in the wilderness, ' Make 
straight the way of the Lord.' " John's answer 
was not very satisfactory to these people from 
Jerusalem. Perhaps the voice forced itself 
rather uncomfortably into the crooked places in 
their lives, and made them think that they would 
have a good deal of straightening to do them- 
selves before the coming of the Messiah could 
be a very welcome thing to them. I wonder if 



PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 37 

none of us feel in that way about our Lord's 
comins: to us bv death, or by his flaming second 
advent. I wonder if we have not a pretty large 
duty of straightening to do. This committee 
asked John various questions about his baptism ; 
but he does not have much to say to them except 
concerning the great and certain coming One, 
of whose advent he is only herald. So the depu- 
tation return to Jerusalem. 

Then the verses of the Scripture here seem to 
go on to tell us of a public discourse of John, 
preached to the people crowding around, the 
next day after the visit of this deputation from 
the Sanhedrim. Jesus himself comes toward 
him amid the throng, and as John sees him, he 
exclaims, ** Behold the Lamb of God, which 
taketh away the sins of the world." John iden- 
tifies this Jesus* as the one who. coming after 
him, is preferred before him. All this public 
sermon of John's here to the crowd, is a sermon 
of distinct speech, and of tender, earnest point- 
ing toward the Lamb of God who beareth away 
the sins of the world, and who was standing 



38 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

veritably there among the people. Nothing 
could be stronger, nothing could be plainer, 
nothing could be more convincing, than this 
public speech of John's about the Lamb of God. 

But the thing I would like to have you notice 
about this public sermon of John's is that, as far 
as the record goes — and like many a clear and 
yearning sermon that has been preached since the 
time of that public service in the wilderness — the 
sermon seems to have made no appreciable 
impression whatsoever. We do not read that the 
sermon resulted in the accepting and following 
of the Lamb of God then by anybody. The 
throng heard it ; as far as we know, they simply 
heard it — they did not act on it. John's special 
disciples heard it ; as far as we know, they simply 
heard it — they did not act on it. The public 
service appeared to come to nothing. The people 
listened, and as far as we can find out, that is all 
they did. 

We have come up now to the special truth on 
w^hich I would fix your attention. Will you be 
kind enough particularly to notice these words : 



PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 39 

" Again the next day after " — that is, the next 
day after this public sermon about the Lamb of 
God who beareth away the sins of the world — 
John stood and two of his disciples. The throng 
were all gone now. There was no public preach- 
ing going on. John was just then in solitude, 
and there were with him only two of his disciples. 
And looking upon Jesus as he w^alked — as we 
w^ould say, as he was taking a walk — as another 
suggests, one of the numerous indications in the 
gospel that Christ was a lover of nature and 
accustomed to meditate and study in communion 
with nature — in the ordering of Divine Provi- 
dence just then, when John stands alone with two 
of his disciples, Jesus comes walking by. And 
now John immediately follows up the thought of 
the public sermon he had preached the day 
before, by private and personal speech and influ- 
ence. And looking upon Jesus as he walked, he 
said, " Behold the Lamb of God.'' And wliat the 
public sermon did not seem to do, the private 
and personal word, following up the public teach- 
ing of the sermon, did do; for we read immedi- 



40 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

ately that the two disciples heard him speak, 
and they followed Jesiis. What public effort did 
not seem to accomplish, private effort did. 

And it is a remarkable fact that this fii^t 
chapter of John's Gospel which, in the latter part 
of it, tells us of the first conqueriug of men to 
Christ, discloses as the weapon of that conquer- 
ing, not the great and public gathering and 
religious service, but through the whole course 
of it the victorious arm of a personal and private 
influence. Just see ; these first disciples are led 
into following Christ, not by a public, general 
speech, but by the private, personal words of 
John the Baptist. " One of the two which heard 
John speak and followed him was Andrew^ Simon 
Peter's brother. He first findeth his own brother 
Simon.'' Simon Peter is brought to Christ by 
the private and personal iiifluenge of his brother 
Andrew. " The day following, Jesus would go 
forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip and saith 
unto him. Follow me." It is the private and per- 
sonal influence of Christ which calls and clasps 
Philip to himself. " Philip findeth Nathanael." 



PERSONAL INFLUENCE. 41 

And so the private and personal influence of 
Philip captures Nathanael. Archimedes, when 
he made one of his discoveries, rushed out into 
the street exclaiming, " Eureka ! Eureka ! I 
have found it ! I have found it ! " Archbishop 
Trench calls this a chapter of Eurekas. Andrew 
findeth Messiah, then Andrew findeth Simon his 
brother, then Jesus findeth Philip, then Philip 
findeth Nathanael." It is a chapter of findings, 
and it is all through the findings of a private and 
personal influence. This then is the truth we 
come to : the value and the victory of 'personal 
work and personal influence. 

Ministers ought to remember this. When the 
public sermon seems to fail, let them follow it up 
by personal, pastoral work. 

Sunday-school teachers should remember this. 
What seems to be failure before others and in the 
class-room, may be changed into shining success 
by the tender, personal private word. 



4* 



MISINTERPRETATION. 

TTTE are told in John's Gospel that our Lord 
^ * Christ needed not that any should testify of 
man, for he knew what was in man. There is 
vast comfort in this fact, in view of the frequent 
misinterpretations of life. I think that is a most 
significant sentence, which I met some time since 
from Meta Klopstock : "It may be that an action 
displeases us which would please us if we knew its 
true aim and whole extent." But precisely what 
may be this true aim and whole extent of an ac- 
tion which somebody may do, we do not know ; 
and what is worse, blinded perhaps by prejudice ; 
or bitter and censorious with grudge; or allowing 
ourselves in the vile habit of a constant and cap- 
tious criticism, we do not seek to know. We 
only, out of hand, declare the motive mean and 
the aim bad. 

Considering the constant and tremendous 
(42) 



MISINTERPRETATION. 43 

denunciation of the Scripture against the evil 
judgment of others, against slandering, against a 
slashing, slaughtering gossip about others, it is 
even frightful to think how blatantly and with 
what slight qualms of conscience even professedly 
Christian people ofi'end in this manner, which 
men are apt to think so slight, but which the 
Scripture calls so groat. 

There was a poor Arab once who, traveling in 
the desert, and accustomed only to water from 
muddied and brackish wells, came upon a spring 
of the purest and sweetest water. So fresh and 
pure did the water seem to him that he thought 
it a not unworthy present to the Caliph of his 
tribe. And so, filling his water-skin to the full 
with it, he started on a long and diflicult journey 
to his Caliph's presence. At last he laid his gift 
of the sweet water at his monarch's feet. The 
Caliph did not despise the poor man's offering ; 
ordered some of it poured into a cup; drank it; 
presented the humble giver with a suitable 
reward. The courtiers, crowding around, were 
making haste themselves to taste the wonderful 



44 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

water, but the Caliph immediately forbade them 
— not a drop of it might they touch. When, at 
last, the humble man had gone, the courtiers ven- 
tured to ask the reason of a command so strange. 
Then the Caliph answered : 

" During the travels of the Arab, the water in 
his leathern bottle had become impure and dis- 
tasteful ; but it was an offering of love, and as 
such I received it with pleasure ; but I well knew 
that had I allowed another to partake of it, he 
would not have concealed his disgust; and there- 
fore I forbade you to touch the water, lest the 
heart of the poor man should have been wounded." 

AVhat righteous and subtly kind appreciation 
of the real extent and true aim of the poor man's 
action! How different this from the too usual 
action ! The too usual action would have been 
for the Caliph, on tasting it, to have made a face 
of disgust himself, and then to have handed the 
cup of the spoiled water to everybody about, for 
them to taste and make faces too. The pure and 
precious motive of the act would have been over- 
slaughed, unappreciated, counted for nothing. 



MISINTERPRETATI ON. 45 

A brother had been grieved, and the rest would 
have had the mean satisfaction of making faces. 

Right liere emerges, and so needlessly, a vast 
amount of the pain of life. It is right here that 
so many of us make needless and bitter pain for 
others. Behind the act we will not be at the 
trouble to go, to see if we cannot find a transfigur- 
ing motive. No, too often we ruthlessly and 
heedlessly, in our thought, change a good act into 
a bad, because we constantly allow ourselves in 
the miserable and malicious habit of almost 
always supposing in some people a bad motive. 

Once on a Christmas time, there was sent the 
poet Whittier a gentian pressed between two 
panes of glass. Looked at from one side, you 
saw but a poor blurred mass of something. But 
looked at from the other side, you saw the exqui- 
site flower, delicately outlined. Suppose the poet 
had persisted in looking at it only from the 
blurred side. That is the way some people will 
persistently look at the well-meant actions of their 
fellows. But the poet w^ould not. And this is 
the way he sings about it : 



46 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

The time of gifts has come again, 
And on my northern window pane, 
Outlined against the day's brief flight, 
A Christmas token hangs in sight. 
The wayside travelers, as they pass, 
Mark the gray disc of clouded glass ; 
And the dull blankness seems, perchance, 
Folly to their wise ignorance. 

They cannot from their outlook see 

The perfect grace it has for me ; 

For there, the flower whose fringes through 

The frosty breath of autumn blew. 

Turns from without its face of bloom 

To the warm tropic of my room, 

As fair as when beside its brook 

The hue of bending skies it took. 

But deeper meanings come to me. 
My half-immortal flower, from thee; 
Man judges from a partial view, 
None ever yet his brother knew. 
The Eternal Eye that sees the whole 
May better read the darkened soul. 
And find, to outward sense denied, 
The flower upon its inmost side. 

And oftener than \Ye think it, there is a flower 
upon the inmost side of action. And the trouble 
with many of us is, that we will neither suppose 
it there, nor take the least pains in looking for it. 



MISINTERPRETATION. 47 

And so we constantly misinterpret those who 
touch us, and become to all around, fountains, 
not of pleasant, but of bitter waters. 

But now, for any pierced with this pain of mis- 
interpretation, there is the comfort of a resource 
and a refuge. There is One who knows us with a 
knowledge penetrating, with a knowledge perfect. 
The Lord Christ needs not that any should testify 
of man, for he know^s what is in man. The Lord 
Christ never misinterprets. 

Oh, comfort one another ; 
For the way is growing dreary, 
The feet are often weary, 
And the heart is very sad — 
There is heavy burden-bearing, 
When it seems that none are caring, 
And we half forget that ever we were glad. 



DOING GOOD. 

rriHE method of Christ with that woman at 

-*- the weirs mouth in Samaria, is full of 

suggestion about this matter. 

Christ used personal contact Here was the 

woman coming to draw water ; here was Christ 

sitting weary and thirsty on the well. "Give 

me to drink," said the Master. At once Clirist 

established a personal relation between that 

woman and himself. It became face to face and 

heart to heart work immediately. A warm 

heart, stirred with solicitude for another, and set 

close up against that other heart — this is the 

mightiest force for good in the wide world. If 

you will look thoughtfully back along your lives, 

you will find that you have been moulded oftener 

and more completely by the close contact of 

separate persons wuth yourself than by any other 

influence whatsoever. Character magnetizes 
(48) 



DOING GOOD. 49 

character. Hearts fashion to their own shape 
others against which they have set themselves. 

Now, this power of personal contact, so con- 
trolling everywhere else, is as mighty in religion. 
Yet I am sure it is just this energy of personal 
contact which the church misses most the use of. 
I know, and I am thankful, that the church of 
to-day is strenuously active in many ways and 
many directions. I know that girdling the 
globe there is a zodiac of mission stations. I 
know that there are well conducted and well 
adjusted and nobly manned societies and boards, 
with regal revenues for the furtherance of Chris- 
tianity. I know that all these are needful and 
must be carried on, and illimitably enlarged 
both in sphere and resource. But is it not true 
that the religion of to-day is one which does not 
closely enough follow the Saviour in his example 
of personal contact? Is it not true that the 
religion of to-day in its forth-putting energies is 
one too much by proxy ? Is it not true that we 
are too ready to trust to incorporated and im- 
posing machineries ; too ready to delegate to 



50 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

some Board or to some minister what should be 
given into the consecrated hands of the royal 
priesthood of the whole church ? 

A church wants a minister. Forthwith the 
country is scoured for a man who will draw. 
Then when he is gotten and does it, possibly by 
means of a bad sensationalism, men cry success, 
and the thing is left to run. But is it not as much 
the duty of the church to fill its building and 
bring outside people under the influence of religion 
as it is the minister's? The minister is but one ; 
the church is many. The minister and the church 
are to be workers together for Christ. Between 
every member of the church and every one who 
has not yielded his heart to Jesus there should 
be established this relation of personal contact. 
The Christ within the heart is to be an outreach- 
ing Christ. Your Christian life is faulty if it be 
not pressed with yearning to make some other 
person Christian. 

The Sunday-school is a noble institution. I 
hail every possible influence which can increase 
its vitality and efficiency ; yet I sometimes fear 



DOING GOOD. 51 

there is many a parent who so uses the Sunday- 
school that he transmutes it from a blessing to 
an evil. He sends his child to the Sunday-school, 
and that is all he does. He divests himself of 
religious responsibility toward his child. He 
commits the vast matter of the Christian culture 
of his own child to some Sunday-school teacher, 
whom likely enough he does not even know. 
He says when he thinks about it, " Oh, the Sun- 
day-school teacher will take care of that." He 
enters into no personal religious contact with his 
children. He speaks to them religiously never. 
He prays with them personally and pleadingly 
never. 

But not thus by any careless way of proxy 
can the church conquer the world, and bring in 
the glad millennial time. Christ sets before us 
the example of personal contact. Upon every 
member of the church, from the littlest to the 
loftiest, this duty devolves. Christianity is 
democratic. Neither are its privileges nor its 
duties delegated to any special, sceptered, sacred, 
priestly class. Ye are all a royal priesthood. 



52 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

For every member there is priestly service. No 
Christian man is doing Christian duty until he 
forms this relation of personal contact with some 
unchristian heart, to point it to Jesus Christ, by 
whom the lost is saved. 

Also, in thus pointing this poor woman to 
himself and so saving her, Christ used passing 
opportunities. A momentary resting place in the 
weary journey, the welFs mouth, the woman 
coming to draw water, the thirst of the traveler, 
— very slight matters in themselves, and yet 
these slight matters were moulded into the occa- 
sion for that marvelous conversation in which the 
sinful, thirsting heart of that poor woman caught 
sight of the gleam of the eternal waters. The 
Lord Jesus did not idly wait for some precious 
opportunity. He compelled passing events into 
precious opportunity. To do this — to become 
alert and skillful in seizing the passing chance — 
is a very high religious attainment. It can be 
done only as religion is a most vital and over- 
coming force in one's own heart. But if it be 
thus with a man, it is an easy matter. " No 



DOING GOOD. 53 

Avork is drudgery except to the unwilling 
worker.'' 

In other years, in the White Mountains, I 
used to meet a queer old man, who believed he 
knew all about the true formation of the earth, 
inside and outside. The earth, he declared, is a 
hollow globe, inhabited w^ithin as well as without. 
Wherever there is water outside there is land 
inside, and wherever there is water inside there 
is land outside, and so on. Of course, it was a 
very foolish theory ; but I was often much inter- 
ested and amused in noticing how utterly full 
the old man was of it, and how naturally he 
made everything you might converse with him 
about, only another path to the discussion of his 
favorite subject. Every grass-blade led to it, 
every rock, every running brook, the clouds in 
the sky. Neither did there seem to be anything 
forced or unnatural about it. The old gentleman 
was so surcharged with his thougtit that it was 
like water confined, seeking egress everywhere. 
It was thus with the old man, because there was 

so much of it in the old man. 
5* 



54 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

If we were only so full of the power and peace of 
our religion, every passing event would be a pass- 
ing chance of preaching. Along the path of every 
one there w^ould spring up multitudes of oppor- 
tunities. There would be set up multitudes of 
pulpits. It was thus always with the Lord Christ, 
To him the lily taught trust. The city on the 
hill was emblematic of Christian influence. The 
leaven in 'the dough meant regenerative force. 
The branches of the vine taught the Christian 
dependence on his Lord. The w^ater which the 
woman came to draw was shining with hints of 
that water of w^hich if a man drink, he shall never 
thirst. Thus each slightest thing, each smallest 
event, w^as transfigured by the Lord into oppor- 
tunity for the telling forth of truth. 

Also, in the pointing this w^oman to himself 
that he might save her, Christ itsed personal 
friendliness. She was a Samaritan, and was 
therefore filled with all possible and bitter preju- 
dice against a Jew. She was a tarnished woman, 
standing despoiled of a precious purity, yet 
Christ showed himself at once her friend. Others 



DOING GOOD. 55 

might fling her off, others might curl the lofty 
lip, but Christ did not. " Give me to drink," he 
said. Receiving a drink from one meant more 
in the Oriental fashion of society than it does with 
us. It was the seal and the signal of friendship. 
When Christ asked her for that water, he meant 
to let her know that she could reckon him a 
friend. He goes further; he consents to ask a 
favor of her. He is willing to put himself in the 
position of obligation to her, if only he may save 
her. It will never do for you or me to stand 
upon some fancied height of goodness, and look 
down upon and lecture people. Even the sinless 
Jesus did not that. He was known all over as 
the friend of publicans and sinners, in order that 
the weary, wandering ones might come to him 
without difficulty, and easily enter the clasping 
of his great love. 

There was in the temple of Jerusalem a gate 
called Beautiful. Its walls were burnished gold ; 
its posts were glorious with richest carvings ; its 
pavements were of rare mosaics ; and along its 
top was flung a golden grape-vine, from whose 



56 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

branches hung huge clusters of precious stones. 
It was the masterpiece of the temple workman- 
ship. It was the joy and pride of every wor- 
shiper within those temple walls. Every Chris- 
tian church should have as well a gate Beautiful, 
formed, not of gold and bronze and jewels, but of 
something costlier. Of these should this gate 
Beautiful be builded — of the hearts of all the 
membership alive with love, putting themselves 
in constant contact with those who do not know 
their Lord ; wisely alert for passing opportunity 
to tell of him ; tender toward all with a gentle 
Christian friendliness, and undespairing of the 
worst. How through such a gate, reared thus of 
living and loving hearts, would multitudes of the 
sinful and the weary and the w^ayward pass, to 
find the pardon and peace and power which is in 
Jesus Christ our Lord ! 



CONTACT WITH JESUS. 

THIS was the one absolute necessity for that 
man smitten with palsy, whom his friends got 
into Christ's presence, breaking up the roof, and 
letting him down before him. Doubtless, this 
contact with Jesus was the thing which he, in his 
sick misery, most desired. Certainly this w^as the 
thing which those four friends of his were deter- 
mined on for him. The earnestness of those four 
friends to get him into this contact is very touch- 
ing. They would not be baffled. The helpless- 
ness of the sick man should not baffle them ; they 
would carry him. The thick crowd blocking the 
path to Jesus should not ; they would try some 
other way. The hindering roof should not; they 
would break it up. Every line of the narrative 
vibrates, as does a harp-string when you strike it, 
with the intense earnestness of these men. If 

human strength and skill could accomplish it, 
(57) 



58 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

this sick man, borne of four, must be laid at the 
feet of the Great Healer. I do not know a more 
pathetic story of intense service for another's sake 
in the whole Scriptures. Contact with Jesus was 
the imploring need ; contact with Jesus, this man, 
smitten into more than an infant's helplessness, 
should anyhow and somehow have. 

Now the miracles of Jesus are acted parables. 
They are the dramas of the gospel. They put 
spiritual truth into living form, and act it before 
your eyes. That helpless paralytic stands forth 
and represents an immense and race- wide spirit- 
ual fact. As helpless as the palsy was rendering 
him from the vigor and motion of his health 
physical, so helpless has sin rendered every one 
toward the righteous and rejoicing spiritual life 
which the law of God demands. Helpless to- 
ward what one should, are men and women all. 
Helpless toward right being and toward heaven, 
is, in itself, the child you love, whom you guard 
so tenderly, whom you would yield your life for. 
" Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and 
the young men shall uttei-ly fail," except as they 



CONTACT WITH JESUS. 59 

wait upon the Lord, who only can renew their 
strength. 

And the Lord Jesus amid that crowd, speaking 
to that man wonderful energizing words, stands 
representative of another profound spiritual truth 
— that the sort of spiritual life which men must 
reach, which your children must reach, can be 
imparted by him only, can flow into human souls 
only from his pierced hands. This is what he 
constantly asserts for himself. This is the start- 
ling difference between him- and every other 
religious teacher that has ever stood among men. 
"My doctrines are w^hat you need,'' these have 
said. " I am what you need," he has said. 

Are men helpless in spiritual darkness? Then 
he is the Light ; the true Light ; the Light come 
into the world; the Light of men; the Light to 
lighten the Gentiles. Then he is the Star ; the 
morning Star; the bright and morning Star; the 
day Star ; the Day-Spring from on high ; the 
Sun of righteousness. 

Are men helpless in spiritual famine? Then 
he is the Bread of God ; the true Bread ; the 



60 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Bread of heaven ; the Bread which came down 
from heaven; the Bread of life; the living 
Bread ; the hidden Manna. 

Are men helpless and tortured in spiritual 
thirst? Then he is the living Water; the Well 
of water springing up into everlasting life, of 
which, if a man drink, he shall never thirst. 

Are men helpless in spiritual wandering, hav- 
ing lost the right path and the true ? Then h^. is 
the one Shepherd ; the Shepherd of the sheep ; 
the Shepherd and Bishop of souls; the good 
Shepherd that laid down his life for the sheep ; 
the great Shepherd that was brought again from 
the dead; the chief Shepherd who shall again 
appear. 

Are men helpless in spiritual weakness and 
inabilitv? Then he is the Strens^th of the 
children of Israel ; the Strength of the needy 
in distress; the Kefuge from the storm; the 
Covert from the tempest ; the Horn of salva- 
tion. 

Are men helpless in spiritual defencelessness ? 
Then he is the Kock ; the strong Rock ; the Rock 



CONTACT WITH JESUS. 61 

of ages; the Kock higher than one's self; the 
Rock of our strength, of our refuge ; the Hab- 
itation of my salvation; my Rock and my 
Redeemer. 

Are men helpless before a threatened spiritual 
penalty of broken law? Then he is the Lamb 
that beareth away the sins of the world ; the 
Lamb slain ; the Priest ; the High Priest ; the 
great High Priest ; the Mediator ; the Propitia- 
tion for our sins ; the Intercessor ; the Advocate ; 
the Surety. 

Are men helpless in the fight of life for want 
of spiritual leadership? Then he is the Captain 
of salvation ; the Author and Finisher of faith ; 
the Leader and Deliverer ; the Lion of the tribe 
of Judah ; the Ensign for the people ; the 
Chiefest among ten thousand. 

Are men helpless for need of a spiritual king 

and governor? Then he is the King; he is 

King of kings; the King of righteousness; the 

King of peace ; the King of glory ; the King 

in his beauty, and the government is upon his 

shoulders. 

6 



62 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

He it is whom men need — not truths about 
him ; Him — not creeds, which declare him ; Him 
— not theologies, which seek to explain him; 
Him — not sacraments, which represent him ; Him 
— not churches, which stand for him ; Him — val- 
uable as all these things are, they are needs 
secondary, not primary. The first, foremost, 
undermost, uppermost, underlying, over-topping 
need is the present Christ, dispensing his forgive- 
ness, speaking his peace, imparting his strength, 
infusing his joy, promising his heaven. Personal 
contact with the personal Christ ; this is the 
awful, stringent, eternity-deciding necessity for 
every human soul. 



WHERE THE CHURCH STANDS. 

fTlHEY had no leisure, so much as to eat." 

-^ Rest ^vas absolutely needful for the 

wearied Lord and his tired followers. " Come 

ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest 

awhile," the Master says. 

They enter a boat to sail across the lake. The 

wind blows fresh against them. They hug the 

shore, and make slow advance. The multitude, 

left behind, see them departing, and somehow 

learn their destination. They see, too, how close 

to the land they keep and how slowly the boat is 

moving. They follow on foot along the shore. 

A few hours' brisk Avalking can compass the 

little sea. When Jesus and the disciples land, 

they find the restful place already peopled with 

those whose walking has outstripped their sailing. 

The crowd sw^ells till more than five thousand 

men, besides the women and the children, have 
(63) 



64 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

gathered there to Jesus with their sicknesses and 
sins. 

There i^ no chance for rest. Retiring to a 
neighboring mountain, Jesus sits down and 
teaches and heals. And so the hours go on. 
Yet do the multitude remain. The shadows 
lengthen toward the night. Still Jesus teaches. 
Still the crowd clings. The disciples grow 
anxious. Perhaps they are a little petulant, 
that they have been robbed of the rest they 
need so much. Here is the multitude in this 
foodless and shelterless place ; the night is near. 
What is to be done ? 

At length the disciples suggest to Jesus — 
" This is a desert place, and the time is now past ; 
send them away, that they may go into the 
country round about, and into the villages, and 
lodge, and buy bread for themselves ; for they 
have nothing to eat.'' 

But the Lord answers, they need not depart ; 
^' give ye them to eat^ 

The story need not hold us further — the con- 
sternation of the twelve, the slightness of their 



WHERE THE CHURCH STANDS. 65 

resource ; the growth of that resource when 
brought to Christ, and when Christ blesses it ; 
the more than five thousand satisfied by that 
which, in itself, was not enough for five. 

But this mandate, "give ye them to eat," is 
singularly significant of the place to which our 
Lord has called his church. 

Jesus does not say to the disciples, you need 
not trouble yourselves about this multitude ; my 
power is broad enough and strong enough to 
carry them. Rather, it is precisely this he does 
command, that the disciples be troubled about 
the throng. Christ lays the burden of the whole 
vast crowd right upon the disciples. The 
presence of the multitude, its hunger, its shelter- 
lessness, the thickening night, — these are just 
the things which the Lord moulds into a claim 
that the disciples may not shirk. "It is your 
duty to help them, and help is to come to them 
through you, O disciples. You are the channels 
of supply. You are the transmitters of the 
divine bounty. You stand between, and intro- 
duce to each other, the wealth of my power and 
6* 



66 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

the emptiness of their poverty. Give ye them 
to eatJ' 

Here, then, does the church stand — in this 
place of mediation. It is no place of mediation 
in the Romish sense of priest-craft and infallible 
authority, but it is a place of mediation in the 
sense of standing between divine fullness and 
the world's need, that they may be brought in 
contact. 

Just as the hunger of the multitude was, in 
Christ's sight, a claim upon the disciples, that 
they should furnish food ; so now, the ignorance, 
the darkness, the spiritual famine, the sinfulness 
of the world, gather themselves into a thunder- 
ous demand upon the church to give Christ to it, 
who only is wisdom for it, light and food, and 
comfort and forgiveness. 

Give ye them to eat ; you are responsible for 
them — the multitude of the unchurched within 
a stone's throw of your sanctuary ; the needy at 
home ; the needy upon distant shores. 

And when our resources seem as meagerly 
proportioned to our duty as seemed those bits of 



WHERE THE CHURCH STANDS. 67 

bread and those two fishes to those disciples, 
staggering before the vast hunger of that crowd, 
let us remember the Christ behind the scant 
supply, and what he did unto it; and let us 
remember, too, that we can never do our duty of 
distribution, except, as through a joyful conse- 
cration of our resources, we get them greatened 
by his power. But the five loaves and the two 
fishes can become a magazine, when blessed by 
him. 



A LESSON FROM THE LILIES. 

rpHAT is a very beautiful fact I came upon 
-^ sometime since about the lilies of the 
Holy Land. They grow even on the barest and 
stoniest spots. They last through the hardest 
droughts. They have large, bulbous roots, in 
which are packed away a reserve of nourish- 
ment, and which securely guard the principle of 
life. So they start up where you never expect 
flowers. But they do more than just grow 
themselves. Their broad leaves, and their large 
blossoms, cast a shadow and attract the moisture 
in the air, condensing it into dew ; and so, pro- 
tected by their shadow and getting fragments of 
their dew, other vegetations begin to flourish 
around and under them. Rich tufts of grass 
grow green about their roots, and nowhere is the 
herbage so luxuriant as under the shadow of 

these beautiful and graceful flowers. 
(68) 



A LESSON FROM THE LILIES. 69 

So I think the Church of Christ ought to be 
like that lily in this dry and difficult world. 
It ought to throw protecting and healing and 
helping shadows. It ought to turn the stony 
spots into beautiful verdure, and fight away the 
evil barrenness. Not Young Men's Christian 
Associations, good as they are ; not temperance 
societies, noble as is the work they do; not 
various efforts unorganized and sporadic, filled 
with a passing blessing as they may be; but the 
real agency, the divine institution, the mightiest 
help for the world, is the Church of the Lord 
Jesus. 

But now the lily is an organism. It is made 
up of root and bulb and stem and leaf and 
flower. And it can only do its mediating duty, 
it can only rescue its patch of ground from bar- 
renness, as all its various parts work, and work 
together — as root and bulb and stem and leaf and 
flower — each and all — work. 

The church, too, is an organism. It is made 
up of pastor and of deacons and of membership. 
And this membership is very various, and vari- 



70 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

ously endowed. Culture, wealth, social position, 
gifts of speech, gifts of persuasion, gifts of 
prayer, gifts of teaching, gifts of sympathy, 
gifts of faith, gifts of visiting — many various 
gifts — are variously distributed, and the church 
can only make its power felt, and do its duty 
worthily, as all its various parts work and work 
together; as the entire membership, pastor, 
deacons — all — yield themselves to service. 



HOLDING POWER. 

"ITTHEN travelers are passing along the River 

^ ^ Nile in those queer boats, with their vast 

sails, which have been for ages the means of 

navigation on that river, it makes the greatest 

difference whether the prow of their boat be 

turned from the river's mouth or toward it. If 

they are going toward the sources of the river, 

bound for Karnak or the Cataracts, they must 

advance aofainst the steadv current settinor gea- 

ward. They must avail themselves of every 

favoring chance and wind; 'or if the winds are 

adverse, they must resort to the tracking of the 

boat, as it is called — the slow towing of it by 

the lazy Arab crew, walkino; and growling along 

the river banks. It is slow work — creeping 

along up stream. 

But if they are going from the river's sources 

toward the sea, bound for Cairo or for Alexandria, 

there is no slow tracking, there is no need that 
(71) 



72 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

much account be taken of the breezes, for all 
the time, steadily flowing, bearing all things on 
its broad bosom, sets on the strong deep current, 
hastening ever toward the ocean. That mighty 
current takes the boat in its arms and carries it 
on and on. 

Now, any one who has ever tried to live truly, 
nobly, worthily, has found himself in the condi- 
tion of the travelers who are beating up against 
the current of the Nile. Somehow, one in such 
a case must all the time make head against a 
tidal tendency. It is a sad fact about life, that 
it is a great deal easier to float with the under- 
lying and ever-moving current toward the wrong, 
than to turn the boat of life the other way and 
keep it set and pushing tow^ard the up-stream 
right. For right is up-stream in this world, and 
not down-stream. The common tendency of 
things is from what is highest and holiest toward 
the expedient, the equivocal, the evil. 

I have read of voyagers up the Nile w^ho were 
stuck for days in the mud, aground, who were 
beset by baflSing winds and borne back by cur- 



HOLDING POWER. 73 

rents ; who but crept on, inch by inch, while tlie 
Arab crew tugged, splashing, sweating, scolding, 
pulling at the rope, by which they just managed 
to draw the vessel along the shore. There is 
spiritual parallel here. It often seems as though 
we did not, and could not, make any advance. 

Sometimes even the clear vision of the Chris- 
tian ideal discourages us. There are times when, 
as the sun bursts through the mists, there flashes 
upon us a more shining conception of the char- 
acter of Jesus. In the light of that we get a 
new view of our own imperfection, brokenness, 
weakness. A kind of paral3^sis falls upon our 
efibrt toward it. " What ! " we say, " to become 
that, to be beautiful with such purity, to be 
lifted into such excellence, to become lovely 
with such sacrifice? Impossible! Such a coarse 
and dirty actual to rise into such an ideal ? It 
cannot be!" And we feel the truth of that 
mournful verse of Schiller: 

Thither, ah, no footstep tendeth ; 

There the heaven above so clear 
Never earth to touch descendeth, 

And the there is never here. 
7 



74 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Then, too, the tug and strain toward goodness 
often weary. Life seems very full of trouble 
and very slight in peace. Besetting sins will 
still beset. An Irishman cut off a turtle's head. 
He w^as surprised, hours after, to see the head 
moving, the jaws opening and shutting. " Surely 
the beast is dead, but he isn't sinsible of itj^ said 
he. So, sometimes, the sins we thought were 
slain keep up their miserable lives. The old 
passion re-appears; the old appetite reunites its 
chains ; the old petulance frets on ; the old dis- 
content whines on; the old distrust fears on. 
With David, we are weary with our groaning ; 
and that sigh of his articulates our own desires : 
" Oh that I had wings like a dove, that I might 
fly away and be at rest ! " 

What the soul wants is some unrelaxing, all- 
propelling, motive; some strong and working 
force, which shall press it against the backward 
setting currents, and urge it onward in the face 
of difficulty and danger and through hindrance. 

I have found a marvelous statement of such 
motive power in Paul's first Epistle to the Cor- 



HOLDING POWER. 75 

inthians. These Corinthians to whom Paul wrote 
were erring brethren. They had become defiled 
with the heathenism of their bad city ; they were 
tolerating and excusing heinous sin. They had 
left fi^htino; the devil to contend with each other. 
They were manufacturing scandal for religion. 
Paul, coming to the rescue, plants among them 
the controlling motive for the Christian life. 
That must hold them. That must compel them. 
That must unite them. That must purify them. 
That, or nothing can. But that can, that will, 
that does. 

*'Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of 
our Lord Jesus Christ." The name of Christ 
means Christ himself; his person, his work, his 
love. What he is, his name stands for. 

This, then, is the motive force for the Chris- 
tian life — the name Christ Jesus; or, to put it 
into words a little more usual to our lips: I 
beseech you, therefore, brethren, for the sake of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. 



CHARACTER AND TRIAL. 

TF real triumph ever come to anybody, it ^vill 
-■- be reached through character, and in no 
other way. Water rises to its level, and no 
higher. In the sight of God; and in the long 
run, in the sight of man, too, for that matter, — 
Ave strike the measure-point of our essential 
being ; we rise as loftily as we are. 

But now such triumphant character must be 
schooled and educated by trial. I know not 
where this fact is better shown than in the 
history of Joseph. 

I am quite sure that any casual reader of 
these old Scriptures would be very apt to too 
much cushion and glove the imprisonment in 
which Joseph found himself caught and gripped. 

Turn to the 105th Psalm. Speaking of God's 

care of his Hebrew people, as illustrated in their 

early history, the Psalmist says: "He sent a 
(76) 



CHARACTER AND TRIAL. 77 

man before them, even Joseph, who was sold for 
a servant, whose feet they hurt with fetters; he 
was laid in iron. Until the time that his word 
came, the word of the Lord tried him." Or, to 
bring out the meaning by a translation nearer to 
the original, "He sent before them a man. 
Sold for a slave was Joseph. They hurt with a 
fetter his feet; into iron came his soul, until the 
time that his word came to pass. The saying of 
Jehovah tried him." 

Stone walls do not a prison make, 
]N'or iron bars a cage. 

John Bunyan can find celestial visions even 
in his Bedford jail, and Madame Guyon can take 
sweet refuge in the heart of the Crucified, behind 
the bars which shut her in, and Joseph can be 
free in mind though he be chained in body. 
But I think we must all confess that Bedford 
Jail and French prisons and Egyptian dungeons 
are not very pleasant places, and that these 
verses from this Psalm, showing us Joseph 
fettered till the manacles cut his flesh, and his 
7* 



78 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

soul closed about with iron, do show us Jehovah 
subjecting his servant to a very severe and con- 
suming trial. Think of some of the elements 
of Joseph's trial. There was an **' Arab strain 
of blood and habit '' in these earlier Israelites. 
They were wont to w^ander at their own sweet 
wills. They were not even held by houses, as 
we are. Their tents could be swiftly pitched 
and as swiftly moved. They were accustomed 
to the breadth of the Syrian plain, and to the 
freedom of the Syrian mountain. A caged 
canary bird does not give you such feeling of 
restraint as does a caged eagle. I shall never 
forget the look of dejection I used to see upon 
the face of a captive Indian in the far West. It 
did not seem as though he of the plain and of 
the mountain ought to be confined. Joseph 
belonged to a nationality whose blood was Arab, 
and whose vocation was the shepherd's. A 
dungeon was a poor exchange for the sweeping 
uplands of Judea, and for the snowy shoulders 
of Hermon. He was at the age, too, when 
physical freedom is most precious, and physical 



CHARACTER AND TRIAL. 79 

bondage most intolerable. Here was one 
element of the iron into which his soul came. 

Notice another element which must have 
made his bondage bitter. He could not feel 
that he deserved it. He had done nothing 
which could w^arrant such strange treatment. 
It was the murderous hatred and jealousy of 
his brothers which had hung him Avith a slave's 
chains, and so had been the primary cause of 
his present plight. If a man has been really 
wrong, and has been caught in the rightful doom 
of wrong, there may be even a slight peace and 
satisfaction in the consciousness that he suffers 
rightly. But such poor solace even was denied 
Joseph. He did not suffer rightly in any way, 
at least upon the human side. 

Think of another element in the iron w^iich 
gripped his soul. The very hardest thing to en- 
dure in the wide world is the result of wrong 
when you have really done the right. When a 
man has called on God, and summoned his en- 
ergy, and struck against temptation, and smitten 
it down, then for him to get the punishment 



80 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

which had belonged to him had he yielded, then 
to have burned into him the stigma of the very 
wickedness he had spurned — that is iron the 
most wounding and tearing for anybody's soul. 
Where, then, is God, the just and the judging? 
It is here that the blackest despair flings down 
its horrid pall. It is here that the wiMest and 
most tormenting doubt asks its bewildering ques- 
tions. It is here that the iron cuts away the 
strongest sinews of a noble purpose. If when I 
do in God's sight, what in my deepest soul I 
know God would have me ; if I have dashed 
aside the evil thing; if I have refused to do 
the wickedness because I could not sin against 
God; and if then God does not stand by me; 
and lets the foulness smutch me when I have 
really kept my garments white; and lets the 
doom smite me which should have smitten had 
I fallen into the vileness, — why then God has 
forgotten, or God does not care, or God is cruel. 
The foundations are destroyed, and " what can 
the righteous do?" Fetters which hurt the 
feet are nothing to this fetter, whose sharp edges 



CHARACTER AND TRIAL. 81 

cut the soul. Like Cain, we cry; and just be- 
cause we have not been Cain-like is our cry the 
bitterer, and the more despairing : " My punisli- 
ment is greater than I can bear." 

It was such barbed iron as this which entered 
the soul of Joseph. He had battled with temp- 
tation and had triumphed ; but it all turned out 
as if he had groveled in a foul defeat. 

I do not say that you are to meet trials so 
terrific and so consuming as those of Joseph, if 
you are to be lifted into the triumph of a holy 
character. But I do say this — that as trial lay 
in the path of Joseph, so trial of some sort must 
lie in yours. You cannot see the real gleam in 
the diamond, except you cut and polish it. Its 
preciousness depends upon the cutting. What 
now shall be said for the comfort of the diamond 
amid its cutting? How shall we vindicate the 
files, and the whirling, grinding emery-wheel? 
Shall we say to it, that being cut it shall stand 
in gorgeous setting, that it shall be worn as some 
rare pendant, that it shall glisten in some crown? 
You shall be set better, being ground, dia- 



82 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

mond, than you were set before you endured the 
grinding. Is that all we have got to say? 

Or, to come back to Joseph, is this all we have 
to tell him, — " O Joseph, you are having hard 
times now, but you shall get into better times at 
last. Your fetters will fall off, your prison gates 
will open, you shall reach up into compensations ; 
instead of slave, you shall become a prince." 

I think Joseph, and any other earnest-minded 
man would have right to answer : '^ That is the 
meanest and poorest sort of comfort. Am I 
a child, that I should take an undeserved whip- 
ping, and then be afterwards comforted with 
sugar-plums? If there be no real reason for my 
horrible imprisonment, and for its barbed iron 
that has been cutting my soul through, then your 
attempt to comfort is gall instead of balm, be- 
cause it robs me of my souFs most stalwart stay — 
that God is just and loving, and really on the 
side of those who fear and honor him. What I 
want, more than princely thrones and pleasant 
times, is to be sure that God is ; and that he is 
no capricious despot, but a kind and wise and 



CHARACTER AND TRIAL. 83 

just and loving Father. This I must be sure of, 
whether I be prisoner or prince. This I must be 
sure of, or else my soul is the captive of despair. 

Now, there is such righteous reason for Joseph, 
and for you and me, amid our trials, and that 
reason is to be found in God's determination 
to lift us into noble character. You grind the 
diamonds, not, primarily, that you may set them 
well, but that you may let out their lustrous 
gleam. God grinds souls that he may fill them 
with the light of true, pure character. That 
was the reason for Joseph's trial, that is the rea- 
son for yours and mine. 

Very different from the soft, effeminate, tale- 
telling, unwise young man was the calm, grand, 
sympathetic, self-controlling, nobly forgiving 
prince. Between the two, God had been work- 
ing with the iron of trial. 



THE BEST LAST. 

rriHE exclamation of the governor of the feast 
-L at the wedding in Cana is suggestive of a 
great principle. 

" Every man at the beginning doth set forth 
good wine, and when men have well drunk " — 
that is, when satiety has begun to come, and the 
pleasurable and discerning sense has slackened — 
" then that which is worse ; but thou hast kept 
the good wine until now," the governor said. 

And herein is disclosed a constant principle 
concerning the gifts of Christ. This glory 
streams from him — that what he gives does not 
pall and fail, does not perish with the using, 
does not grow from more to less, but grows 
from less to more. Evermore Christ's last is 
best. 

Just at this time there was a man living who 

had the whole world in his control. To him, as 
(84) 



THE BEST LAST. 85 

to a greedy centre, were flowing constantly the 
fairest, choicest things the world could give. 
For him the most precious vintage. For him 
the rarest luxuries of earth and sea and various 
climates. 

A little after this, that he might lay off all 
care, and meet no hindrance as he fed himself 
with all voluptuous pleasures, he withdi^ew to an 
island, soft with the tenderest sunshine, and de- 
licious wdth enchanting shade, and fascinating 
with smooth verdure and swelling hill — the island 
of Capreae, set there like an emerald amid the 
sapphire waters of the Bay of Naples. He 
tried, perhaps, the hugest experiment ever tried 
as to the real and continued satisfaction of the 
w^orld's best wine. 

" Tristissimtcs id constat hominiim'^ — it is con- 
fessed the most gloomy of mankind, says Pliny 
of him. And from amidst his splendid experi- 
ment with the world's wine ; from his wealth in- 
estimable; from his freedom from care; from his 
green bowers of pleasantness ; from his palaces, 

the richest that the w^orld could build ; from his 
8 



86 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

utterly ungirded and Titanic self-indulgence — 
the wretched Tiberius, the Emperor of all the 
world, can only send out this ^Yail to the Roman 
Senate : " May all the gods and goddesses de- 
stroy me worse than I daily feel if I know, Con- 
script Fathers, what to write to you." 

Ah! the world's wine palls. There h an 
adder in its cup. It stings with remorse. It 
blights with the shadow of coming and certain 
doom. 

See Paul, victor though defeated, triumphing 
under the very gleam of Nero's sword : " I have 
fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I 
have kept the faith, henceforth there is laid up 
for me a crown of righteousness." 

See John Wesley, with the rapturous smile 
upon his face, saying, with dying breath : " The 
best of all is, God is with us." 

Hear the Christian Bishop Janes, settled firmly, 
for a life long, on the Rock of Ages, sounding 
forth this as his dying testimony : " I am not 
disappointed." 

"And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; 



THE BEST LAST. 87 

every several gate Avas of one pearl ; and the 
street of the city was pure gold, as it were trans- 
parent glass/' ^'And God shall wipe away all 
tears from their eyes ; and there shall be no 
more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither 
shall there be any more pain, for the former 
things are passed away." 

That city may be ours, if we will have it so ; 
if we will but give ourselves by faith to Christ. 
For us shall swing inward those gates of pearl ; 
the gold, as it were transparent glass, shall be 
pavement for our feet ; for us all tears shall be 
wiped away, and death be vanquished, and sorrow 
be helpless to scale the jeweled walls protecting 
us, and pain shall never pierce us more. And 
then, how true it will be, what better language 
for our lips than this, ^* Master, thou hast kept 
the good wine until now." 



FAITH. 

TN order that Christ may do anything for a 
-■- man, he everywhere prescribes an absolutely 
necessary condition. This condition is faifh. 
Christ always says : " If you would be saved by 
me, you must believe me." 

The Scripture is very explicit on this point. 
He that believeth shall have everlasting life. 
" God so loved the world that he gave his only 
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life.'* 
" He that believeth on me, though he were dead, 
yet shall he live." "These things are written 
that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the 
Son of God, and that, believing, ye might have 
life through his name." Everywhere, between 
man's lostness and Christ's rescue, between man's 
guiltiness and Christ's forgiveness, between man's 
death and Christ's life, stands, as the bridge con- 
necting them, this indispensable thing, faith. 
(88) 



FAITH. 89 

And, if you will look into the life of Christ, 
you will find that, while he stood among men like 
a fountain in the desert, eager to let forth the 
healing waters that were in him, to fill their 
thirst and ease their pain and soothe their sor- 
row, he was always most particular to fix between 
himself and those he loved this channel and con- 
nection of faith. AVe read that in one place he 
could not do many mighty works because of their 
unbelief. Before he put forth any special won- 
ders, how often he looked on the hearts about 
him, to see if there were in them this aptitude 
and condition for his help! The unloosing of 
his power seemed to depend on this. Sometimes 
he would wake up this faith by a question, as if 
to fix the thought, as to blind Bartimeus : " AVhat 
wilt thou that I should do unto thee ? " Some- 
times it was by some hidden, searching require- 
ment, bringing to light any hidden reservation 
of soul which prevented faith, as when he said 
to the young man : "Go, sell what thou hast and 
give to the poor, and come and follow me." 
When the leper, muffled in his sackcloth, stood 



90 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

before him, saying, " Lord, if thou Avilt, thou 
canst make me clean," his faith at once called 
forth the healing word and touch of Christ. 
When the centurion was sure that a word of 
Christ's, at a distance from his sick servant, was 
as powerful a thing as the presence of Christ by 
his sick servant's side, he healed his servant by a 
word, exclaimino; : " I have not found so o:reat 
faith ; no, not in Israel." When the Syro-Phoe- 
nician woman came pleading for her demon-pos- 
sessed daughter, he did not answer her at once. 
He proved her first. He seemed to thrust hard 
obstacle into the pleading face of prayer. " It 
is not meet to take the children's bread and cast 
it unto the dogs." Yet, when she had the faith 
which would cling to him, notwithstanding all 
discouragement, and would plead her lowly suit, 
"Yea, Lord, but the dogs eat of the crumbs 
which fall from their master's table," then faith 
W'On blessing, and he dismissed her with the 
joy of her healed daughter in her heart, and 
with this benediction on her: "O woman, great 
is thy faith. Be it unto thee even as thou wilt." 



FAITH. 91 

So always between all that Christ can do and 
longs to do for men and the men themselves, rises 
this inevitable and rocky condition, faith. 

Why, then, is it so necessary that from the 
hearts of men toward Christ there must come 
forth this faith before Christ can in anywise help 
them ? This is the reason : faith is the appropri- 
ating faculty. The curriculum of a college will 
do the student no good whatever, except, by per- 
sonal appropriation, he take hold of it. The man 
overboard ^vill drown, though the life-buoy flung 
from the ship's deck float within his reach, if he do 
not put forth his hand and seize it. In the Old 
Economy, the law said : " And he [the offerer] 
shall put [lean] his hand upon the head of the 
burnt offering, and it shall be accepted for him 
to make atonement for him." Before, even amid 
those shadow^s, the shadow could change to the 
least substance, the man must confess everything 
as his, and for the sake of his sin. As another 
has somewhere said : " If any Israelite had said to 
his servant, I have done something wrong, some- 
thing that requires an offering. I am very busy 



92 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

just now ; do you take a lamb to the priest, and 
let him make an atonement for me — in such a 
ease there would have been no acceptance, no 
blessing." The priest would have told the serv- 
ant that such proxy religion could not be per- 
mitted. So, in the New Economy, there must be 
a personal appropriation. The man must lean the 
hand of his faith upon the Lord Christ, before he 
can receive from Christ the help and healing 
that are in him. Faith is the appropriating 
faculty. 

But now it is not necessary that our faith be 
such jubilant faith as that of Paul, when he 
flung forth the challenge, " Who shall lay any- 
thino; to the charo;e of God's elect?" nor such 
confident faith as that of Paul again, when he 
said : " I can do all things through Christ which 
strengtheneth me ; " nor such victorious faith as 
that of Paul again, when he said : " I am now 
ready to be offered. Henceforth, there is laid up 
for me a crown of righteousness." It is not nec- 
essary that our faith be so fixed, so firm, so large, 
so perfect, before it can become the channel 



FAITH. 93 

through which shall flow to us the grace and 
peace and blessing of the loving Christ. John 
Bunyan has a character called Mr. Fearing, 
who yet made triumphant entrance into the 
Celestial City ; and there be many Feeble 
Faiths and Mr. Fearings among the pilgrims 
now, who take hold of Christ with a faith most 
small and weak, but who yet do take hold of 
him by faith, and into whom, therefore, his sal- 
vation flows. 

That woman who dared do no more than lay 
her finger on the fringe of the Master's garment, 
is an instance of a faith by no means intelligent 
and strong, but still of a faith sufficient to bring 
her into contact with the helping and the heal- 
ing Christ. 

Faith includes these two elements: First, 
loss of trust in self Second, dependence of 
trust on another. Take a child by way of 
illustration. A child-life is always a life of 
faith. That little child — what can it do for 
itself? It cannot find its way through the city 
street; yet it does not fear. It cannot find its 



94 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

clothing, or make its clothing, or clothe itself; 
yet it has no fear of nakedness. It cannot build 
a house or buy a bed ; yet it does not fear that 
it will be shelterless or without a pillow. It can- 
not grow a harvest or manufacture food ; yet it 
fears no hunger. It knows its weakness ; yet 
nothing is so certain of care and guidance. No 
one feels so certain of it, because the parent 
walks with it on the street; the parent clothes 
it; the parent builds the house; the parent 
furnishes and smooths the pillow; the parent 
gives it bread; and the child, conscious of its 
own weakness, puts trust in father and in mother, 
and so is free and glad. That is faith; empti- 
ness of dependence upon self, fullness of depend- 
ence on another. 

Such faith this woman had. She had lost de- 
pendence on herself. The twelve years' sickness 
and all her money gone to physicians had cured 
her of self-trust ; but this new Rabbi, this great 
wonder-Avorker — perhaps the healing in him, 
which had helped so many others, might help 
her as well. So, despairing of her own power, 



FAITH. 95 

tremblingly, almost doubtfully, but yet really, 
she reaches forth the hand of trust in him and 
touches him; and thus this tie of faith was 
formed between herself and the healing Christ, 
and thus the vigor which was in her Lord be- 
came her own. 

Christ respects a man's free volition. Faith 
is that movement of the soul through which 
it passes into surrender to him and seizure of 
him. Faith is the appropriating faculty. With- 
out faith, nothing in religion is possible; with 
faith, everything is possible, because by faith 
the soul allows the incoming and the energy of 
the saving Christ. 



PEAYER. 

II /TAKING mention of you in my prayers,'' 
-^*-^ says Paul to the Ephesians. A great 
sight these words reveal — Paul at prayer. And 
right here we come at a reason for Paul's vast 
and various success. Paul not only wrought 
much. Paul prayed much. 

Heed the lesson. Right here in prayer is to 
be found the tap-root reason for all high and 
branching religious achievement in any direction 
■ — in the winnino; of holv character inwardlv, in 
the widening of Christ's kingdom outwardly. 

Is there anything more pathetic in all history ? 

He was utterly worn out and very sick. There, 

as Dr. Blakie tells us, in the vast and tangled 

wilds of Africa they laid him on a rough bed in 

the poor hut, his faithful black followers had 

builded for him, where he spent the night. Next 

day he lay undisturbed. He asked a few wauder- 
(96) 



PRAYER. 97 

ing questions about the country. His faithful 
black followers knew that the end could not be 
far off. Nothing occurred to attract notice during 
the early part of the night; but at four in the 
morning, the black boy who lay at his door called 
in alarm. By the candle still burning, they saw 
him, not in bed, but kneeling at the bedside, with 
his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. 
He had passed away on the furthest of all his 
journeys, and without a single attendant. But 
he had died in the act of prayer — prayer, offered 
in that reverential attitude about which he was 
always so particular ; commending his own spirit, 
with all his dear ones, as was his wont, into the 
hands of his Saviour ; and commending Africa^ 
with all her woes and sins and wrongs, to the 
Avenger of the oppressed and the Kedeemer of 
the lost. 

And here again you come at the reason of a 
life like David Livingstone's — so pure and strong 
in itself, so vast in beneficent result. Livingstone 
made mention of Africa in his prayers ; he died 
doing it; so, though he died, he was victor of her. 



98 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Prayer was the beating heart of so great a 
life. 

Or, go further back and think of that critical 
moment pregnant with your liberties and mine, 
with the free civilization of these latter days, 
when, in the presence of the Emperor Charles V., 
the master of half the world, and of his glittering 
court, and of the scarlet emissaries of a grasp- 
ing and tyrannizing Romanism throwing as yet 
unbroken and blighting shadow over Europe — 
the monk Luther, at the Diet of Worms, was 
given grace to stand for the plain truths of that 
Bible which Rome had shoved out of the hands 
and memories of men; when, notwithstanding 
crowned Emperor and powerful state, and apos- 
tate and oppressive church, he was given grace 
to speak those words which meant an unfettered 
Bible, and so free thought, and so your liberties 
and mine — " Here I stand ; I can do no other- 
wise; God help me; Amen." There were* no 
braver, more far-reaching words ever said by 
human lips since the morning stars sang to- 
gether. 



PRAYER. 99 

But the reason for grace to say them, is to be 
found in Luther's prayers before he said them. 

Listen Avhile one, overhearing while he prays, 
takes the passionate pleadings down — 

" O Almighty Eternal God ! what a thing is 
this world ! How do the people speak against 
thee ! How little is their confidence in God ! 
How weak and tender is the flesh ; how strong 
and busy the devil, with his apostles and worldly 
wise men, who only look at what is great and 
mighty and has a lofty appearance. 

" If I should turn my eyes that way, all would 
be over with me. Ah God, O my God, stand by 
me ! O my God, help me against all the wdsdom 
and reason of this world ! Do it thou ; for thou 
canst do it, thou alone. It is thy cause; it 
is not mine. Come, O my God. I am ready. 
I will go like a little lamb, for the cause is just 
and is thine." 

The prayers of Luther made his words half 
battles. Because by prayer he took hold of the 
arm of Strength, he was strong. 

Or, see the Apostle Paul kneeling in his 



100 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

imprisonment, and making mention of these 
Ephesians in his prayers; and not of these 
Ephesians only, but of the Corinthians and the 
Colossians and Philippians and the Thessalo- 
nians and of Timothy and Philemon. Read his 
Epistles, and you will see how constant was his 
habit of bringing his own needs, like his thorn 
in the flesh, and the needs of all the churches, 
before his God in prayer. You may find what 
reasons you please for Paul's vast success in the 
great duty of his apostleship ; because he was 
learned ; because he was naturally so active and 
so enthusiastic ; because while a Jew, and great 
in their culture, he was also deeply conversant 
with Greek culture, and so among the Jews 
could become as a Jew, and among the Greeks 
as a Greek. But while all these are reasons, 
and without doubt exerted mighty influence, 
they would all have been as nothing without 
the reason ; Paul prayed. He took hold of the 
strength of God by prayer. He girded himself 
with that great strength by prayer. He made 
alliance with God by prayer. 



PRAYER. 101 

Let us heed the lesson. Christ said, " Without 
me ye can do nothing," and therefore without 
prayer we can do nothing, for it is by prayer we 
take hold of Christ. 

Hear John Knox as he cries, *'Give me 

Scotland or I die." Hear Zwingli, the Swiss 

Reformer, as in prayer he grips the word of 

Christ, " Hast thou not promised to be with us 

unto the end of the world ! " Hear Melanchthon, 

Luther's friend and helper, as he says, " Prayer 

is the best means of consolation ; thus trouble 

impels me to prayer, and prayer drives away 

trouble." Hear Philip Henry tell his children? 

" Be sure you look to your secret duty ; keep up 

that, w^hatever you do ; the soul cannot prosper 

in the neglect of it ; apostasy generally begins 

at the closet door." Hear Samuel Rutherford 

as he tells of a special place in which he was 

wont to pray, " There I wrestled with the angel 

and prevailed. Woods, trees, meadows, and hills 

are my witnesses." Hear Jonathan Edwards, as 

at the beginning of his religious life, he resolves 

"Very much to exercise myself in prayer all my 
9* 



102 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

life long." Hear Robert McCheyne say, " I am 
persuaded that I ought never to do anything 
without prayer, and, if possible, special secret 
prayer." Hear Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, tell his 
pupils that he intended to offer a prayer before 
the first lesson, that the day's work might be 
undertaken and carried on solely to the glory of 
God and their own improvement, that he might 
be the better enabled to do his work. Remem- 
ber Harlan Page, as he '' expected success from 
God through the blessing of the Holy Spirit in 
answer to prayer." And as these, and such as 
these, followed Paul in making mention of their 
needs in prayer, let us do likewise. Neither as 
men and women in the hurry and bustle of the 
daily life, nor as a church, nor as preaching in a 
pulpit, nor as teaching a Sunday-school class, 
nor as sowing the seed of the kingdom along the 
wayside, nor as engaged in bringing up our 
children, nor as set in any of life's relations, nor 
as burdened with any of life's duties, can we 
either be what we ought, or do what we ought, 
without prayer. 



PRAYER. 103 

More things are wrought by prayer 

Than this world dreams of. ■ Wherefore let 

Thy voice 
Kise like a fountain for me night and day ; 
For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of 

Prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
For so the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of G-od. 



PEAYER AND FAITH. 

rpHE elder Pliny was a great philosopher. 
-■- He was as fine a specimen of a man as 
heathenism produced. He was much given to 
the study of nature, chiefly that he might 
gain some hint concerning the Immeasurable 
Creative Spirit whom he believed to be behind 
and through it. But, as I have read of him, he 
has seemed to me oppressed always with a great 
sadness ; — life to him was little illumined. He 
was restless with longing; stricken with the 
famine of the soul. No man's appreciation 
could be more profound of the exalted Spirit 
of the universe. But, as he looked at nature 
and thought of the dim Creator, he saw nothing 
to bridge the chasm between man and that Un- 
known, All Tianscendent Spirit. And so, shut 
away from the light of any special revelation, 

he came to look at the world only as some 
(101) 



PRAYER AND FAITH. 105 

mighty mechanism tyrannized over by destiny, 
overbuilt by a brazen sky, concerning which no 
thought ruffled the expanse of the Supreme 
Intelligence. 

" What God is," he says, ^' if indeed he be 
anything distinct from the world, it is beyond 
the compass of man's understanding to know. 
But it is a foolish delusion which has sprung 
from human weakness and human pride to 
imagine that such an Infinite Spirit would 
concern himself with the petty affairs of men." 

That was the secret of his sadness. How 
great soever and self-contained a man may be, he 
cannot carry a hopeful and joyful heart if he 
believes that God does not care for him; and 
that one cannot reach, touch, move his God. 

There are many men just now, w^riting upon the 
lids of the Bible "Antiquated," "Useless," "Out- 
grown," discarding all revelation but their own 
doubtful interpretations of scientific facts, who 
re-assert this old belief of Pliny's, and seek to 
spread again over the world the ancient heathen 
gloom. 



106 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

But the Bible comes to men expressly to 
scatter such sadness. The burden of its revela- 
tions is that God does care; can somehow be 
touched with the feelings of their infirmities ; 
can be moved to listen to their cry ; and answer 
their requests. *' Like as a father pitieth his 
children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear 
him." 

"I waited patiently for the Lord, and he 
inclined unto me and heard my cry." " When 
thou passest through the waters I will be with 
thee. When thou walkest through fire thou 
shalt not be burned, neither shall the flame 
kindle upon thee nor any heat, for I am the 
Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy 
Saviour." **' The Lord is nigh unto all them 
that call upon him, to all them that call upon 
him in truth." 

But not only does God tell us thus in words 
that he is sensitive to human want; he has 
written out the same truth in the distinctive 
characters of action. Christ, the express image 
of the God-head bodily, left heaven and came to 



PRAYER AND FAITH. 107 

earth to let men know the Infinite Father's 
heart. You remember how it was. There was 
never a prayer uttering toward Jesus, the least 
pleading, that the face of Jesus did not brighten 
back in answer to it. The heart of Jesus is the 
heart of God. 

But not only is it thus revealed to us that God 
cares for us and can be moved by us ; but we 
are also told by what force we may thus reach 
him. That force, the Scripture tells us over and 
over again, is faith. " He that cometh to God 
must believe that he is, and that he is the Re- 
warder of them that diligently seek him.'' 
" Without faith it is impossible to please God.'* 
Faith reaches up its hand and takes hold on 
God. Faith touches the heart of God. Faith 
moves the arm that moves the world. God will 
say to faith, " Be it unto thee even as thou wilt.'' 

The trouble is that many think themselves to 
hold faith toward God who really have but 
certain opinions about him. Faith is never a 
mere opinion. Here, for instance, is a man who 
will repeat the creed for you glibly — he is not an 



108 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Atheist. When you tell him that God is loving 
and heedful of his creatures, he does not dissent ; 
and yet this man never tests in any personal, 
real way the love and care of God. He never 
comes into contact with God, nor does he care to. 
He sees the truth of an interfering God as men 
see mountains on the remote limits of the 
horizon, dim Avith the distance, shrouded — almost 
concealed — with mists. Such thought toward 
God is never faith ; it is opinion only. It holds 
no real relation to the management of life. It 
never becomes an energetic element in spiritual 
pulsations. But faith which reaches out and 
touches God is not alone assent of the intellect, 
it is consent of the heart. It believes in God, 
and embarks on the belief, as men give themselves 
to ships with which to cross the ocean. It con- 
ceives of God as full of love and minute in care ; 
and boldly goes into his presence to claim his 
love and task his care. It stands before the 
divine promises as soldiers before some fort, sure 
that they can win possession of it. It takes God 
at his word and grandly holds him to his word. 



PRAYER AND FAITH. 109 

This is faith. Clear assent of the intellect and 
passionate consent of the heart. It is not 
opinion; it is belief clothed in the flesh and 
blood of action. 

When prayers miss such faith as this, they arc 
like men paralyzed. They have no moving 
power. 

It was Wesley's constant prayer that he might 
have more faith. It should be ours as well! 
Thus, as an old writer has it, " our prayers will 
not come limping home." 

10 



FAITH AND RESULTS. 

T HEARD, some time ago, a little incident 
^ which has since helped me mightily. One 
of Mr. Spurgeon^s preachers was discouraged. 
He seemed to be effecting nothing. He came to 
tell his discouragement. He said : 

*'Mr. Spurgeon, I have been preaching and 
preaching, and it does apparently no good what- 
ever." 

In his quick way, Mr. Spurgeon immediately 
answered : 

" Well, you do not believe that God will bless 
every truth that you declare, do you ? " 

" Oh, certainly not," answered the discouraged 
man. 

"And that is just the reason why he does not," 

solemnly replied the great London victor for the 

gospel. 

The trouble was, the preacher had been going 
(110) 



FAITH AND RESULTS. Ill 

at his duty faithlessly, and so had reaped noth- 
ing. He did not believingly expect, therefore 
he did not achieve. 

I heard the other day an incident in the same 
direction, which, strange as it may seem, is still 
strictly true. In New York, a young woman 
became much concerned for the religious welfare 
of her brother. He was a non-church-goer. It 
seemed impossible to mduce him within the 
gospel proclamation. One Lord's Day morning, 
much burdened for him, she determined believ- 
ingly to pray that that day he might attend the 
services in her own church. She asked the Lord 
for the gift of his attendance, and then, relying 
on the promise that those who believe receive, 
set about believing that the gift that day re- 
quested would be that day granted. At the 
breakfast table her faith met its first assault. 
When she asked her brother if he would not 
attend church with her that day, he replied; 
" I cannot ; I must go to Brooklyn." 
Still she held on believingly; went to her 
Sunday-school class, praying and believing; 



112 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

entered the church, praying and believing. 
The services began. Her brother did not 
appear. The time wore on until the sermon 
was just commencing. Then, thinking faith 
useless longer, she deliberately gave up believ- 
ing. And so the worship was concluded, and 
she went home. 

Beaching home, she found her brother there, 
and was at once greeted with the remark : 

" I almost came to your church this morning. 
I went over to Brooklyn, but somehow thought 
I would come back. At about eleven I reached 
the corner near your church, determining to go 
in. Then I thought it too late, and did not 
enter." 

When the sister ceased believing, at that 
moment the brother stopped on his way toward 
the literal answer of her prayer. 

Now just what the relation may be between 
our faith and definite answer to our prayer; 
between our faith and triumphant religious 
results, — we may not be able to tell precisely. 
Heavy mists hang here, which the keenest eye 



FAITH AND RESULTS. 113 

of our human reason cannot pierce. But that 
tkere is some relation, real and radical, is the 
constant assertion of the Scriptures: "Accord- 
ing to your faith be it unto you." 

The Christian harvester who does not go forth 
expecting to reap a harvest with the sickle of 
God's truth will surely gather no grain. The 
trouble with the most of us is we do not believe 
enough, w'e do not expect enough. What we 
need is faith which grips the promise unrelax- 
ingly. It is he who, like William Carey, believes 
great things of God, and, therefore, expects great 
things from him, w^ho shall master obstacles, and 
plant the standard of the cross upon the battle- 
ments of sin. 

One of the best ways I know in which faith 

may reverently put God to the test is the Inquiry 

Room. After the sermon, or after the teaching 

of the Sunday-school lesson, give, somehow, 

chance for quiet, personal religious conversation. 

It is quite surprising how thus immediate results 

of religious effort will appear. We are helpless, 

but the Holy Spirit is Almighty. That Almight- 
10* 



114 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

iness is pledged to us. Let us believe the divine 
pledging, and act as though we did. Let us go 
forth in a faithful expectancy. David says, 
*^ My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O 
Lord ; in the morning will I direct my prayer 
unto thee, and will look up.'' It ought to be 
translated, and will look out. That is to say, 
David declares he will believingly expect answer 
to his prayer, and keep his eye open that he may 
see the answer coming. It is a principle we 
should never forget in our Christian working, 
that results do really spring from energetic and 
persistent faith. 



DOUBT. 

TOHN the Baptist, doubting in his prison, and 
^ sending to Christ to ask, "Art thou he that 
should come, or do we look for another ? " is a 
most suggestive sight. It is helpful, too, since a 
"fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.'' If 
doubt smote the sturdy Baptist, it is not wonder- 
ful that now and then it smites ourselves. Some 
of the reasons for John's doubt may be suggestive 
of the reasons for our own. 

One reason plainly was a misconception of the 
divine way and time. John had been preaching 
the kino;dom of heaven as at hand. The kino;- 
dom of heaven — what does that mean? It means 
right triumphant, the evil crushed, bad men 
undermost, good men uppermost. And he who 
was to be Kino; over this kingdom, and who was 
to lead it in, had come at last. John had heard 

the voice from heaven approve him, and had 
(115) 



116 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

himself welcomed him to his great mission. 
Why, then, should not the kingdom come at 
once? This was the time for it, there was the 
King for it. Now the divine fire was to scathe 
and burn. Now, with fan in hand, the Mighty 
One was to purge the world's threshing floor, 
was to gather the wheat into his garner, was to 
consume the chaff. 

But as John looked out from that prison of 
Machserus, he could see no signs of righteous vic- 
tory. He could see no attempt on the part of 
Jesus to win it. The skies were just as blue as 
ever. The earth was just as firm. The processes 
of providence were just as calm. He whom John 
thought to be King was only preaching to the 
poorer classes, was only healing here and there a 
few sick, was tarrying at wedding feasts, was 
dining with Pharisees and publicans. Herod 
still sat secure upon his throne. His crime 
flaunted itself. The partner of his guilt was tri- 
umphant in her royalty so foully gained. Evil 
had the upper hand. John himself pined in 
prison. And yonder was the Messiah, only a 



DOUBT. 117 

poor Jewish peasant after all, wearing no crown, 
not even seeking to be crowned. If the kingdom 
w^ere to come, why did it not come ? Where was 
the heavenly reign ; where was the Holy Ghost, 
where was the fire, where were the earthquake 
and the whirlwind ? 

So doubts began to gnaw away John's faith. 
Perhaps he had made a mistake; perhaps this 
Jesus was not, after all, the Messiah. Wherever 
John looked, he began to see only this misty, 
wavering, intangible, tormenting, horrible Per- 
haps. 

But John's trouble was the thinking that 
God's kingdom must come in John's way, not 
in God's; that God's kingdom must come in 
John's time, not in God's. 

And is not this a frequent reason for our 
doubt to-day? We forget that God's ways are 
not ours, nor his time ours. If we cannot see 
the feet of God treading that path which our 
thoughts mark out, if w'e cannot see the hand of 
God disclosing itself in that time which we have 
called a crisis — then God has no kingdom, then 



118 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

the universe stands draped and dreary in the 
fog of a terrible Perhaps. 

And yet, O imprisoned preacher, O fore- 
runner of Messiah, the kingdom of God has 
come and its King has appeared ! The kingdom 
has been set up. That King shall reign — not 
swiftly, suddenly, with vengeance, with fire, as 
you think ; but slowly, patiently, through suffer- 
ing, the cross, the death, yet, oh how surely and 
gloriously as God thinks ! 

In the old time in Connecticut, they had what 
was called the Standing Order — an ecclesiastical 
arrangement, a kind of union of Church and 
State, fraught Avith all sorts of evil, and directly 
opposed to the spirit of our free institutions. 
Old Dr. Lyman Beecher w^as Pastor in Litch- 
field, belonged to the Congregational Standing 
Order, believed in the system utterly, and when 
measures were taken to overthrow it, fought 
them with his whole strength. But he was 
defeated, and then Dr. Beecher thought that the 
foundations of the universe were out of course. 
But he lived Ions; enoucrh to see that what he 



DOUBT. 119 

had thought destruction, was really God's up- 
building, and long afterward he said about that 
time; "For several days I suffered what no 
tongue can tell for the best thing that ever hap- 
pened to the State of Connecticut^ Ah, we want 
more faith in God, and less in our own rickety 
human methods. 

Also John was now a prisoner. Here was 
another cause for doubt. It was one thing to 
be the commanding preacher of the Wilderness, 
under the bright heavens, fanned by the free air. 
It was another thing to be in prison and chained 
to waiting. 

Well, sometimes there are for us prisons — 
prisons of inactivity, John, struggling and preach- 
ing in the Wilderness, needed no proof that the 
Christ had come. John, shut up in the prison, 
fell into doubt. As bats gather in dark caves, so 
do doubts spread their hideous wings in these 
glooms of inactivity. Perhaps we cannot ex- 
plain it, but it is a law of life which experience 
declares, that action and certainty go together. 
A man full of work has no time to doubt, he 



120 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

has only time to do. A man Avho has nothing 
to do but to sit theorizing and sentimentaliz- 
ing with himself, will soon find that he will 
have enouo^h to do in fio-htino* doubt. In 
this working world, where the Father worketh 
hitherto and the Son works, where the seasons 
turn their ceaseless round, where buds expand 
to leaves, and flowers to bloom, and seeds press 
into harvests, things will always seem awry to a 
man out of sympathy and community with the 
universal energy. A great reason why men are 
such large doubters religiously, is because they 
are such small doers religiously. 

There is the prison of ill health. I have seen 
those who were the sweetest saints of God, very 
pale and sad with confinement here. A man in 
health is like a broad and roomy house, standing 
upon the hill-top, upon all sides of which the sun 
pours healthful light, and in all sides of which 
the open doors and lighted windows receive the 
radiance, and the breezes, and the perfume. A 
man in sickness is like that house built into some 
close city block, with the doors shut, with the 



DOUBT. 121 

windows narrowed and fastened down, damp and 
darkened. What can a man know of the glory 
of the spring in such a house? So is it that 
sickness sometimes fastens the doors and walls 
up the windows of the senses, and puts the soul 
in prison. In that darkness, doubt is very apt 
to dwell. 

There is the prison of conscious sinning. Said 
a man to me : "I cannot pray and do this thing ; 
I cannot indulge in this and go to God." Of 
course he could not. He had shut himself 
within the prison of sinfulness. He had barred 
out the light altogether. God could not be near 
him ; and where God is not, all fears must be. 
The man who sins w^illfully cannot help doubting 
deeply. Doubtless, there was no such cause for 
the doubt of John ; but it is a frequent cause for 
doubt with us. 

But John took the right step out of doubt. 

He gave himself to prayer. " Now when John 

had heard in the prison the words of Christ, he 

sent two of his disciples and said unto him, ' Art 

thou he that should come, or do we look for 
11 



122 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

another ? ' " That is the worst possible thing to do 
with doubt — to hold it within yourself, to brood 
over it, to wonder how a man who has once been 
certain can now be so uncertain, to question 
back and forth whether a man who has so little 
faith can ever reach up into firmer. Christ 
would have you trust him as you would your 
friend. If you are bound into friendship with 
another, and something comes that casts a 
shadow on it — your friend does something or 
says something, or you hear that he has done or 
said something, which clashes with his profession 
of love to you— then, if you love him, you will 
not take that thing which makes you doubt him, 
and harbor it, and dwell upon it, and revolve it, 
but you will go to him at once in the noble 
frankness of friendship, and ask for explanation. 
So treat Christ. Tell him your doubt in prayer, 
and he shall meet you as kindly as he met the 
doubting cry of John. 

Only remember that, while John could not 
free himself from his prison, it is sometimes 
possible for you to free yourself from yours. 



DOUBT. 123 

For you have shut yourself in, you have not 
been shut in. A real prayer means the casting 
down of such prison walls as willfully thrust 
themselves between your soul and the vision of 
Christ's face. 



EESOUECES. 

T SPENT a lovely summer day at Malmaison. 
-*- It is about seven miles west of Paris. The 

palace was sadly shattered when I saw it. It had 
received no repair from Prussian shells ; but as I 
passed through its rooms and wandered along 
the lovely avenues of its sweet grounds, and loi- 
tered by its lake-sides, I seemed to be attended by 
the presence of those who rendered it historic — 
of him beneath whose tread Europe was wont to 
tremble — of her, the wedded and the wronged, 
the gentle and the suffering Josephine. 

It was when his wonderful star flamed bright- 
est, and before the shadow of that disastrous 
wrong had smitten her, that Malmaison was most 
his home. But there was one place in which I 
waited longest. It was a summer house, apart 
from the main chateau ; set by itself amid a tan- 
gle of shading trees. In the centre of its single 

(124) 



RESOURCES. 125 

room there stood a large and level table. Down 
upon you from the walls there shone the great 
glittering N., and underneath were Avritten in 
golden letters the names of his signal victories. 
This summer-house was the study of the great 
man. It was in this room he elaborated the plans 
of many of his most marvelous campaigns. It 
was upon that table that his maps were spread 
and studied. It was within these walls that he 
calculated and arranged his resources of men, 
material, money. It was because he was so 
strong in various resources, conceived and mar- 
shaled here, that he was so strong for victory in 
a hundred fights. The meanest soldier marching 
beneath his banners went as in certain triumph, 
because he knew that the great Napoleon had 
laid his mighty thought and hand upon mighty 
and multitudinous resources, and that since he 
was his soldier he would surely -win. 

Lift now your thoughts to another Captain, 
and to an infinitely grander conflict. Said a 
British statesman, "A great nation cannot have 

a little war." It is no little war that Christianity 
11* 



126 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

is waging. In the words of the now classic 
sermon of Dr. Way land, " Its object will not have 
been accomplished till every idol temple shall be 
utterly abolished, and a temple of Jehovah 
erected in its room. Until this earth, instead 
of being a theatre, on which mortal beings are 
preparing by crime for eternal condemnation, 
shall become one universal temple, in which the 
children of men are learning the anthems of the 
blessed above, and becoming meet to join the 
general assembly and church of the first-born 
whose names are written in heaven." 

Now, the question is one of resources. What 
is there in Christianity which can make the world 
capitulate ? 

The battle had been already joined. The 
crash of conflict was already sounding. Nero 
was desolating the faithful by fire and by sword. 
It was a crisis. There were to be other crises 
still. John is wrenched from the Church at 
Ephesus, and flung a prisoner upon that lonely 
rock which breaks the waves of the Egsean Sea. 
Then for his comfort, and for the comfort and 



RESOURCES. 127 

f 

courage of all Christians, there was flashed upon 
him the vast vision of the Revelation. It casts 
its shining circle around the succeeding ages. 
Affliction there shall be. Seals shall be broken, 
and trumpets shall resound. There shall be 
flying angels and falling stars, and signs in the 
sun and moon and earth. There shall be here- 
sies and schisms. There shall be gatherings 
of opposing forces, and Armageddon contests. 
But the Great Captain shall go steadily from 
conquering to conquering. Never shall he be 
worsted. Till at last, as tempests pass into the 
softest calm, the vision ends in the new heaven 
and the new earth, w^herein dwelleth righteous- 
ness — in the tabernacle of God with men — in 
the tearlessness, the deathlessness, and the pain- 
lessness of the redeemed ; for the former things 
are passed away. 

Now, in almost the flrst sentence of this 
prophecy of triumph, I find a statement of the 
resources of Christianity. John received his 
message from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful 
Witness, the First-begotten of the dead the 



128 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Prince of the kings of the earth — he that 
hath loved us and washed us from our sins in 
his own blood. Here are the Christ's resources. 
Marching with him, they are ours. These must 
out-measure the puissance of any foe. Analyze 
a moment these resources. 

First, the truth. The message comes from 
Jesus Christ, who is the faithful Witness. A 
faithful witness is one who utters the exact 
truth, and truth is something conquering and 
eternal in its very nature. 

Second, the truth substantiated. He who is 
the faithful Witness is the First-begotten of the 
dead. The indestructible fact of the Resurrec- 
tion is the primal sanction for every declaration 
of our Christianity. 

Third, present divine power. For that ever 
faithful Witness, and the First-begotten of the 
dead, is now the Prince of the Icings of the earth. In 
another place, the apostle calls him " the King 
of the ages.'' The pierced hand is on the helm 
of things. 

Fourth, Another resource of Christianitv is 



RESOURCES. 129 

sacrificial love, " Unto him that loved us, and 
washed us from our sins in his own blood/' 
The fervor of the broken heart of the Lord 
Christ must melt all worldly opposition at the 
last. 

Let us, tired pastor, wavering Sunday-school 
teacher, wearied worker for righteousness any- 
where, be courageous, then, and hopeful. We 
are on the winning side of things. The battle 
may be difficult, but the triumph is certain. 
Let us fasten our vision upon that, and fight 
onward even to the death. 



WAITING ON THE LORD. 

rriHERE is much speech among us about 
-*- churches waiting on the Lord. That 
waiting of the early church before the coming 
of the Holy Spirit is the best illustration of 
what such waiting is. If the Lord's churches 
waited on him more in this fashion, they would 
certainly become more flooded with his power. 

These waited obediently. Wondering, not 
altogether understanding, yet filled with faith, 
and luminous with an exceeding joy, these dis- 
ciples come up to Jerusalem, exactly to obey 
their Lord's command. There they gather in 
some upper room within the city. The eleven 
apostles — Peter, James, and John, and those 
whom the Lord had called with them into 
apostleship — are there. Mary, the mother of 
the Lord — she, patient and submissive, saying 

ever, "Be it unto me according to thy word," 
(130) 



WAITING ON THE LORD. 131 

she is there. Those who stand in close kinship 
and brotherhood with Jesus, sharing with Jesus 
the motherhood of Mary, though not the father- 
hood of God, — these, who, at length, believed on 
him, are there ; and those loving women, last at 
the cross and first at the sepulchre, who had 
followed him on the sad final journey from 
Galilee down to Calvary, — these are there ; and 
besides these there is a throng of others whose 
names we do not know. The whole company of 
believing, waiting, hoping ones, is one hundred 
and twenty strong, gathered there together. 

Obediently these were waiting ; but what was 
their waiting? A supine, careless, unstrenuous, 
ineffectual dilly-dallying? Oh, no, that may, 
indeed, be waiting, but that is never waiting on 
the Lord. 

It was a waiting grounded on an unquivering 
faith. Of the fulfillment of the Lord's promise, 
they were absolutely sure. The baptism of fire 
they were certain w-ould descend. 

It was a waiting in continued and energetic 
prayer. As the Greek tells us, they intently 



132 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

gave themselves to prayer. Laying hold of the 
promise of their risen Lord, they pleaded for its 
fulfillment. Strange, this place which prayer — 
this intense longing of the human heart, this 
pleading of the human voice — holds, interme- 
diate, between the promise and the fulfillment of 
it. And yet it does hold a place so valuable 
and eminent. 

It was a waiting together. They were all with 
one accord in one place. Peter was not absent, 
because he could not exactly fellowship the 
previous doubtfulness of Thomas. John was 
not away, because Peter had once tumbled into 
a base denial. Mary did not refuse to come, 
because the Galilean brogue of some of them 
grated a little on her refinement. None of the 
men nor any of the women were out of their 
places, because it was a rainy day, or because it 
was a sunny day, or because it was not exactly 
convenient to be there, or because the turban 
had become a little worn, or the tunic had 
become a little shabby, or because Andrew or 
Simon would occupy so much time, or because 



WAITING ON THE LORD. 133 

any were in a cold, listless, careless state. They 
were waiting together. 

And then besides, they were waiting with one 
accord. Their minds and hearts were set utterly, 
resolutely on this one thing, the fulfillment of 
the promise, the flaming of the baptism of fire. 
Perhaps they remembered the word of the Lord 
Jesus, how he said, " Again I say unto you, that 
if t^yo of you shall agree on earth as touching 
anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for 
them of my Father which is in heaven." 

It was a patient waiting. Perhaps they 

thought the baptism of fire would fall on the 

day succeeding the ascension ; if not then, on the 

day succeeding that. Certainly, then, the day 

after; but the baptism of fire did not come. 

Surely, then, when seven days have rolled 

around, when the full week has elapsed since the 

ascension ; but not then even did the baptism of 

fire shine. Another day, and then another, and 

then another still. Ten days have sped away ; 

"not many days" was the promise. But are not 

these waiting days multiplying to many ? Does it 
12 



134 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

not seem as thouojh the shadows were bednninor 
to fall and darken over the fulfillment ? And 
yet they waited obediently, unitedly, accordantly, 
continuously. They were not disappointed. 

If, in these times, we had more of their 
w^aiting, I am sure we should receive more of 
their power. 



IDOLIZING. 

THAT was a divided family in that old time. 
Father and mother did not work together. 
I am afraid there are many people still, like 
Isaac and Rebecca, married, — and yet not mar- 
ried through and through. Marriage ought to 
be union of soul, first and foremost. People 
may live in the same house, and yet they may 
live in different thoughts. Do you remember 
that beautiful poem of Bayard Taylor^s to his 
wife : 

I was the crescent; thou 

The silver phantom of the perfect sphere, 

Held in its bosom ; in one glory now 

Our lives united shine, and many a year — 

Kot the sweet moon of bridal only — we 

One lustre, ever at the full, shall be ; 

One pure and rounded light, one planet whole, 

One life developed, one completed soul ! 

For I in thee, and thou in me, 

Unite our cloven halves of destiny. 

That is a true marriage — where the thoughts 
(135) 



136 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

chime, where the purposes are one. Where no 
division of any sort is in the least permitted; 
where Isaac will love Jacob for Rebecca's sake, 
if he cannot for his own, and where Rebecca will 
love Esau for Isaac's sake, and where both shall 
plan together the best and most right things for 
all, without the clash and intrusion of cross pur- 
poses. You cannot build the best home upon 
hearts in any wise divided. It was feared they 
could not finish Cologne Cathedral, because the 
foundations were thought to be giving way. 
You cannot rear the beautiful and heaven- 
ward-pointing spires of the finished home un- 
less the foundations of an utter union of heart 
and purpose in wife and husband are true and 
strong. Though you may try, there wdll be sag 
and breakage somewhere. 

Rebecca overhears what Isaac speaks to Esau 
concerning the giving of the blessing. It will 
never do to have that purpose consummated. 
Better than anything else in the world, she 
loves Jacob. The crown must shine upon his 
head at any hazard. She will set her mother's 



IDOLIZING. 137 

hand to putting it there by fraud, since, as she 
thinks, there is no other method. 

That was idolizing — that affection of Re- 
becca's, as real precisely as though she had 
bent before some graven image. It is possible 
to manufacture idols out of your tenderest and 
most absorbing loves. Out of the children, 
even, whom God has given you. And yet, 
how womanly it all was! There are touches 
about it you cannot help admiring. How am- 
bitious she was, and yet how self-forgetting I It 
was of Jacob only she thought, not of herself; 
how woman-like ! It was idolatry of a person, 
too, rather than of a principle. How woman- 
like again! As another says: "A man's idolatry 
is for an idea ; a woman's for a person. A man 
suffers for a monarchy; a woman for a king." 
She was altogether reckless of the consequences 
which might come to herself. How like a 
woman here, too, in the grand devotion of 
womanhood! When Jacob fears that it will 
all be found out, and that curse will fall 

instead of blessing, how womanly and even 
12* 



138 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

motherly the answer: "Upon rae be thy curse, 
my son ! " 

Now, do not make a mistake. A great deal 
of troubled thought often arises in sensitive 
hearts lest idols should rise and rule here, in tl;e 
realm of the affections. I have often heard 
mothers say, " I love my child so much, I am 
afraid I make an idol of him." And then they 
set themselves at trying to restrain the tides of 
their affections. They say to themselves, I love 
so intensely, I must love less ; and they attempt 
to do it ; and they cannot, any more than the 
tides can help flowing in. And so they are 
full of trouble, because they think they may be 
failing somehow in fealty to God. Now, be sure 
of this : the more you love those whom God has 
given you, the more rightly religious are you ; 
the more are you doing as God would have you ; 
the more are you standing in the blessed sunshine 
of his smile. Nobody ever loved wife, husband, 
child, brother, sister, too much. The intensity of 
your affection is not wrong. Love until your 
love floats and carries off your nature in its 



IDOLIZING. 139 

sacred freshet. That is righteous, that is relig- 
ious, that is as God would have it. Thus, you 
are not idolatrous. It is only when your affec- 
tion interferes with truth and duty that you have 
sunk your love into idolizing. Here was Rebec- 
ca's wrong. Jacob was more to her than truth, 
than God. Jacob was so much to her that, for his 
sake, she would lend herself to evil. So she was 
idolatrous. Intensity of affection is not idolizing. 
Interference, for affection's sake, with the highest 
right, that is idolizing. 

And so idolatrous Rebecca sets herself at work 
to teach her best loved Jacob fraud. Oh, to 
what pitiable purposes even our affections may 
be perverted ! To what loose ends we fall when 
we forget the right ! What a tangle, thus, does 
our life become ! Why, this woman is all un- 
sexed. It is Lady Macbeth in Scripture. Noth- 
ing thinks she of the good Duncan. Nothing 
thinks Rebecca of the dim-eyed Isaac, of the 
defrauded Esau, of the righteous character, even, 
of the Jacob whom she loves. She will twist him 
even full of deceits. She will bid him even run 



140 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

the risk of the cursing which wrong brings. How 
cruel wrong is always ! If right is safest, it is 
always kindliest too. 

This is idolizing, when, like Rebecca, we let 
our love draw us from the truth for love's sake. 



CONCERNING SIN. 

rpAKE, for example, that sin of Jacob's in his 
-^ seizure of the blessing. 

Consider, like all sins, it was a sin first in 
thought. Some plotting purpose to get the 
better of his brother Esau had long dwelt in 
Jacob's mind. Such thought was in him years 
back, when he wrenched the promise of the birth- 
right from him. It is the powder of bad thoughts 
which the tinder of occasion sets aflash. As a 
man "thinketh in his heart, so is he.'' Here 
is always the guilt in germ, — in the admitted 
thought. All temptations and all occasions to 
sin are powerless, except so far as they fall in 
with previous meditations upon the guilt. Be 
more anxious that you think rightly than that 
you do rightly. Pure thinking will make pure 
doing. We are safe only as we bring our 
thought into captivity to Christ. 

Consider, it was a sin, like all sins, urging on 
(141) 



142 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

into deeper and wider sinning. He will first 
prepare to do the lie — he puts on the skins, 
and takes the meat he means to have his father 
think is venison. Next, he will speak the lie, 
" I am Esau, thy first-born." Next, he will 
build the fortification of profanity about the 
lie, — he will use, impiously, the eternal name : 
"The Lord thy God brought it me." And 
so beginning, he is pushed on into all manner of 
deceptions. Everything about him is a lie. 
" Happy the man," says Robertson, " who 
cannot, even from the faint shadows of his 
own experience, comprehend the desperate agony 
of such a state ; the horror mixed with harden- 
ing eflTrontery with which a man feels himself 
compelled to take step after step, and is aware 
at last that he is drifting, drifting from the 
great shore of Truth, like one carried out by the 
tide against his will, till he finds himself at last 
in a sea of falsehood ; his whole life one great 
ocean of false appearance." Sinning is like 
sliding upon those great ice-hills they have in 
Canada, in the winter. You cannot just tip your 



CONCERNING SIN. 143 

sled or bit of ice over the top, and slide a foot or 
two and then stop, — start and you go. 

Consider, here was a sin to which Jacob was 
tempted even by his own mother, and yet that 
did not excuse. Oh, this tremendous solitariness 
of sin appalls me often ! I may find palliations, 
but I never can find such excuses as shall lift 
the responsibility from my separate soul when I 
have done a wrong. That is the trouble, that I 
have done it. 

Consider, this was a sin along which the divine 
purpose flowed to its accomplishment ; thus the 
prophecy came to its fulfillment, that the elder 
should serve the younger ; but this did not make 
it less a sin. Out of the hard-headed and hard- 
hearted bigotry and cruelty of Philip the Second 
of Spain, God brought religious liberty to Europe 
and America, through the gates of the Dutch 
Republic. But, because God did thus, Philip 
the Second was no less, perhaps, the most infer- 
nal king who ever sat upon a throne. When 
God makes even the wrath of man to praise him, 
that does not change man's wrath to righteous- 



144 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

ness. Great truth — sin cannot disappoint or hin- 
der God; but in this shining truth I can find no 
license for sinning. 

Consider, this sin was a seed which Jacob 
planted. That is the constant trouble with men. 
They think that sinning is sowing stones instead 
of seeds. Put a stone into the ground, and that 
is the end of it. It will lie there. It will come 
to nothing. You have planted a bit of rock, and 
that is all. Put a seed into the ground, and you 
have started something on the way toward fruit- 
age, and toward such fruitage as is wrapped up 
in the brown capsule. That is the trouble with 
sinning. It is seed planting, not pebble planting. 
It is not that you have done a wrong, and will 
now have done with it. You cannot have done 
with it. You have started something toward 
fruitage, toward the sort of fruitage which be- 
longs to the evil deed which you have done. 
"Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
reap." Nothing is more striking in the w^iole 
Scripture than the sight of Jacob reaping him- 
self, through his whole life^ that which he had 



CONCERNING SIN. 145 

sowD. Notice, he gets the birthright and the 
blessing through his mean fraud ; but, somehow 
or other, the deed turns on him, and he gets what 
he so stooped to gain, defrauded of everything 
which makes it valuable. He is first and chief, 
but he is first and chief in exile. Among his 
kinsmen, in the enjoyment of the honors and 
emoluments of that which he has gained, he 
may not stay. Esau will slay him. Eebecca is 
alarmed ; she must save the son she loves so 
much ; out of her sight he must go. Not as the 
inheritor of the promises ought to go, as a prince, 
and with a princely retinue; but on a desolate, 
difl[icult, dangerous journey, through wastes of 
sand, and in perils of banditti, he must go, a 
lonely pilgrim, a fugitive exile, through four 
hundred and fifty menacing miles, before he can 
be assured of safety among his mother's relatives 
in Haran. This thing which he has won is a 
poor stripped thing, after all. 

Ah, we reap harvests like the seeds we sow! 
" Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of this- 
tles?" 
13 



DIVINE EEMEDY FOR SIN. 

"IVTOT long since an engineer was running a 
-*^^ passenger express train through from Phil- 
adelphia to Jersey City. It was one of the swift- 
est trains, and heaviest, such as are intrusted only 
to the most experienced engineers. As the train 
was going, a heavy connecting-rod of the driving- 
wheel on the right of the engine broke, and one 
end of it, swinging upwards, struck the cab be- 
neath the engineer and shattered it to a thousand 
pieces! The man fell senseless on the engine. 
He was both burned and scalded. The pain 
quickly restored consciousness. The engine, with 
its train, was rushing forward with fearful velocity 
to certain destruction. Inside the long train of 
cars, men were reading, sleeping, talking, laugh- 
ing. Inside the long train of cars, women were 
playing with their babies. The fireman jumped 

from the tender and managed to escape. The 
(146) 



DIVINE REMEDY FOR SIN. 147 

engineer might have escaped as well, but he crept 
along the side of the engine, and with his burned 
hands got hold of the lever, reversed the engine, 
and applied the air-brakes. Now, do you not see 
that the engineer was the real saviour of that train ? 
that he took upon himself all the terrible death 
which menaced that whole train, and daring it 
himself, thrust its greedy, awful shadow back 
from these men and mothers and little children ? 

Or take this other more historic story, how, 
one night, after a great battle, when his men were 
utterly exhausted, the great Napoleon was pacing 
about the camp, and came upon a tired sentinel 
asleep. Then the emperor took upon himself the 
obedience of the soldier, and paced his beat for 
him until he awoke, and then gave him back his 
musket. Can you not see how Napoleon took 
the place of that sentinel, doing his duty, and 
suffering the pain of sleeplessness in his stead, 
and so kept back from him the penalty for sleep- 
ing at his post ? 

Of course, such instances as these are but the 
dimmest possible figures of the immense truths 



148 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

wrapped up in the atonement; but they are at 
least dim figures. I cannot find the doctrine of 
a substitutionary atonement out of relation and 
awry with the facts of life. I do not find it diflS- 
cult of belief. To me, it seems to mate itself 
with every noble deed of self-sacrifice; with 
everything most worthy and most praiseful in 
the best human moods ; with every parental pain 
and service for the child's sake ; and tying itself 
into beautiful analogy with all these, to be itself 
the utmost and consummate flower of them all. 

Listen to these words from Professor Henry, 
late of the Smithsonian Institution. They are 
among the last he ever wrote. He was no 
dreaming sentimentalist, he was no loose thinker ; 
he was a keen-eyed man of science, he was an 
adept in searching facts and estimating them. 
He would not have been at the head of the 
Smithsonian Institution at Washington, had he 
not been. These were what he considers the 
facts of the human life and conscience : *' In 
my own mind I find ideas of right and wrong, 
of good and evil. These ideas then exist in the 



DIVINE REMEDY FOR SIN. 149 

universe, and therefore form a basis of our ideas 
of the moral universe. Furthermore, the con- 
ceptions of good which are found among our 
ideas associated with evil can be attributed only 
to a being of infinite perfection like that which 
we denominate God. On the other hand, ive 
are conscious of having such evil thoughts and 
tendencies that we cannot associate ourselves 
with a Divine Being who is the Director and 
Governor of all, or even call upon him for 
mercy, without the intercession of one who may 
affiliate himself with us^ 

These, then, are the ideas which Professor 
Henry declares to be scientific. God holy ; man 
sinful; chasm between the holy God and the 
sinful man ; that chasm to be bridged only by 
an intercessor affiliating God with us. Where 
can you see such intercessor bringing God and 
man together, standing for man and yet satisfy- 
ing God? Only at the cross can you see him — 
man himself, and taking upon himself man's 
duty and doing it, and taking upon himself 

man's death and dying it, and so honoring the 
13* 



150 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

law and expiating sin ; and yet also God himself 
— bringing God and man together. Here, then, 
may I see the divine remedy for sin in the 
blood of the Divine Victim, who was human, 
and therefore in him humanity met the doom of 
guilt; who was divine, and who therefore could 
sustain and exhaust the doom. 

Captain Hedley Vickers, smitten under a 
sense of sin, came to his table one morning 
broken-hearted and crying out, " Oh, wretched 
man that I am ! " As he said the words he 
chanced to glance at his Bible, which lay open 
before him. Suddenly his eyes rested on that 
Scripture : " The blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, 
cleanseth us from all sin." " Then," said he, " it 
can cleanse me from mine;" and instantly 
believing, he was filled with joy and peace. 
From that hour to the time when he fell in the 
trenches before Sebastapol, he was in peace. Ah, 
Hedley Vickers, you could get peace nowhere 
else, because you could see remedy for sin no- 
where else save in the blood of the cross ! 



CHRIST THE LIGHT. 

pHRIST is the light for life which guides. ^'I 
^ am the light of the world," he says. What 
the fire-pillar was to the Israelites, marking out 
their way as they toiled through some difficult 
night-march, that is Christ to men to-day. Our 
Lord said these words during the feast of taber- 
nacles, when two huge candelabra, burning in the 
temple courts, shot out their radiance ; and, just 
as no court in Jerusalem, no leafy booth out on 
the hill-side, but might get radiance and guidance 
from those huge temple lights, streaming their 
rays out into the darkness, so there is no man 
who may not receive the illumination shining 
forth from Christ. He did not say he was the 
Light for any special persons, or races, or nations. 
" I am the Light of the world,'' he said. 

Nothing is truer than that men need this light 

for guidance. I have been reading a wonder- 
(151) 



152 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

fully interesting book, called *' The Conflict of 
Christianity with Heathenism/^ by Dr. Ullhorn. 
It is the story of the grandest fight that was ever 
waged, and the most marvelous victory that was 
ever won — that of a little believing company, 
who rejoiced in the light of Christ, and took him 
for guidance, with and over the hoary heathenism 
and mighty systems of philosophy which did not 
know and would not see the light of Christ. 
This need of even the greatest men — in war, in 
government, in thought — for some sure and shin- 
ing guidance, comes out constantly and most 
pathetically in these pages. This is what Pliny 
used to say : " There is nothing certain save that 
everything is uncertain, and there is no more 
wretched and yet arrogant being than man. The 
best thing that has been given to man, amid the 
many trials of this life, is that he can take his 
own life." Julius Caesar could conquer Gaul and 
found an empire; he could and did say, that he 
did not believe in the diverse and warring gods 
of heathenism ; but, notwithstanding, he was all 
the time held in such terrible and superstitious 



CHRIST THE LIGHT. 153 

fear of something, he could tell scarcely what, 
that he never thought of stepping into a chariot 
without first muttering some magical formula as 
a preservative against accident. The great Au- 
gustus, who was so great that he could take up 
and carry on and so substantiate the work of 
Csesar, that the Roman Empire should stand 
thenceforward for more than a thousand years, 
and who sometimes scoffed openly at the gods of 
heathenism, was, nevertheless, so bound and 
blinded by superstitious fear, that he would 
dread misfortune through the entire day if, on 
rising in the morning, he had chanced to put 
the left sandal on the right foot. 

That heathen culture, lifted as it was, was 
always cruel. It could gladly glut itself at the 
sight of blood in the arena, when, for its holiday 
amusement, gladiators and captives fought to the 
death. It could make sport at the misfortune of 
others ; it used to have idiots about itself, not 
that it micrht love them, but that it mio-ht lauo^h 
at them. The wife of Seneca had such an idiot 
for her sport. The poor thing grew blind before 



154 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

her death ; and, the wonder of it was, did not 
know that she was blind, but thought the house 
dark — that was all. Seneca was a great man ; so 
great that he could write things that sounded so 
much like precepts of the New Testament that 
some have thought he must have had intercourse 
with the apostle Paul, though there is no evi- 
dence of that ; but he confesses that he could not 
find the light. Of this poor fool Hapaste, at 
whom they used to laugh in the house of Seneca, 
because she did not know she was blind, he 
writes: "But you may be sure that this at which 
we laugh in her happens to us all. The blind 
seek for a guide ; we wander about without a 
guide." 

Now Christ says to all the world, " § am the 
Guide for life ; I am the world's Light." 

He is such a guiding Light because he is the 
Light. Moral guidance shines from him, because 
he is the one perfect specimen of moral living. 
Constantine the Great was the worshiper of 
Apollo, and Apollo was the god of the sun. His 
army numbered but forty thousand men. The 



CHRIST THE LIGHT. 155 

army of Maxentius, his adversary, numbered 
three times that. Constantine was in great doubt 
and trouble. What should he do? Whither 
should he turn? He knew the God of the Chris- 
tians. But should he worship Apollo, or their 
God ? Then he saw, one day, a wondrous sign. 
The sun was declining in the west, but upon the 
sun, and brighter than the sun, he saw a cross, and 
around it, in gleaming letters, " By this sign con- 
quer.'' Thenceforward the cross shone on his 
banners, and by this sign he did conquer. 

We may call it legend, but the truth for us 
within the legend is, that as that cross outshone 
the sun, so the light of Christ's example outshines 
all other radiance. He is the Light for guidance, 
because he is the Light. As the sun paled behind 
that cross, so every other guide for life pales and 
dims in comparison with him. I get from him 
the light of perfect moral guidance, because he 
is the perfect man. 



TRUE Self-interest. 

TTERE is the key-board of a musical instrii- 
-'--^ merit. Some of the notes are higher and 
some are lower, yet all are equally legitimate 
musical notes, and all are necessary to the sound- 
ing of the entire harmony. 

Here is the key-board of motives by which a 
human soul is played upon — I mean that key- 
board which God uses, not that the devil uses. 
Some motives you can call lower and some 
higher, yet all are motives rightful, and all are 
motives needful, that the soul may send back 
answering melody to God. 

When the Lord says, " Seek ye first the king- 
dom of God and his righteousness, and all these 
things shall be added unto you," he plays upon 
the motive of an enlightened self-interest. To 

translate it into our common speech, the Lord 
(156) 



TRUE SELF-INTEREST. 157 

says that supreme choice of God and steady ser- 
vice of his righteousness pay better than any 
other sort of life, since, in the long run, to that 
choice and service these other and lower worldly 
boons are surest to gather. Supreme choice of 
God and a steady service of his righteousness are 
a better investment than the overtopping choice 
of self and the service of wrong. So, too, in this 
other Scripture, God touches with his finger the 
same key of motive. " For what is a man advan- 
taged if he gain the whole world and lose himself, 
or be cast away ? " To choose wrong and to get at 
last the wreck of wrong, though in that choice 
you become for the time the possessor of the 
whole w^orld, is a bad bargain — is, everything 
considered, the worst thing you can do for your- 
self. The motive touched upon is that of a true 
self-interest, call it a lower motive, if you please, 
that Francis Xavier sung : 

My God, I love thee ; not because 

I hope for heaven thereby, 
Nor yet because who love thee not 

Must burn eternally. 
14 



158 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Thou, O my Jesus, thou didst me 

Upon the cross embrace ; 
For me didst bear the nails, and spear, 

And manifold disgrace, 

And griefs and torments numberless, 

And sweat of agony, 
Yea, death itself, and all for me 

Who was thine enemy. 

Then why, O blessed Jesus Christ, 

Should I not loye thee still ? 
Not for the hope of winning heaven, 

Nor of escaping hell ; 

Not with the hope of gaining aught, 

Not seeking a reward ; 
But as thyself hast loved me, 

O ever-loving Lord. 

So would I love thee, dearest Lord, 

And in thy praise will sing ; 
Solely because thou art my God, 

And my eternal king. 

And that, you say, is the highest, noblest, 
most celestial motive — the motive of a true love, 
which thinks only of its object and nothing of 
the reward this object can bestow. And what 
you say is true. 

But it is also true that other motives must be 



TRUE SELF-INTEREST. 159 

struck, in order that this higher one may be. 
Before you can get the bloom you must have the ' 
seed, and the seed buried under ground. Because 
the bloom is better than the seed, you do not 
therefore despise the seed. 

An enlightened self-interest is not selfishness 
— though it is often crudely and carelessly con- 
founded with it. If God should say to you, 
"Be sure you enter heaven, because there is only 
just so much heaven, and if you do not get it, 
somebody else will ; seize your chance, therefore, 
and get in first, and so crowd others out " — that 
would be an appeal to selfishness, for selfishness 
is love of self beyond others ; is the determina- 
tion to get the best for self at the cost of others. 
But a true and enlightened self-interest is a 
desire to be the best and to get the best that one 
can and one ought, not at the cost of others, but 
without injury to others. 

To selfishness God never appeals, because the 
motive is a wrong one. 

To a true self-interest, to a desire to be and to 
have that which is really worth the having and 



160 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

the being, God does appeal ; for that motive is a 
right one. 

Certainly nothing can be truer, and nothing 
can be more right, than that I, a soul weighted 
with an eternal destiny, should desire, and deter- 
mine to reach, the most shining destiny possible 
for myself. 

It is not a question as towards others. Nobody 
will have less of heaven, because by God's good 
grace at last I enter it. It is a question for 
myself It is a question demanding answer from 
a true self-interest, and this desire for the best 
good of the self, that the soul may rise into the 
glorious realm and possession God means the 
soul should rise to, is a desire rio-htful and les^iti- 
mate, and one which God does appeal to when 
he beseeches me not to make a bad bargain for 
myself, and though I may win the world, yet 
lose myself. 



CONQUERING PROMISE. 

n TALWART and girdling promise this—" So 
^ shall my word be that goeth forth out of 
my mouth ; it shall not return unto me void, but 
it shall accomplish that which I please, and it 
shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." 

That is to say, there has been some definite, 
divine word spoken about the world. That word 
is sure to be filled with fact. It shall be brimmed 
with the accomplishment of the divine pleasure. 
It shall go, as an arrow to its target, straight to 
the mark of the divine purpose. 

Like the snow and rain, shall this word be, 
the prophet has been saying. Not heedlessly do 
the rains fall. Not uselessly do the snows cast 
their white mantles upon the hills. Through 
them the sower wins his seed, and the eater 
bread. So shall God's word be. It has a mean- 
ing and a ministry. Not so sure is the harvest, 
14* (161) 



162 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

as its fulfillment. Not so certain is the budding 
of the spring after the snows have done their duty, 
as is the glad accomplishment of God's word 
about the world. It shall not return unto him 
void. It shall prosper in the thing whereto he 
has sent it. 

Constantly do men join issue with the prophet 
here. In many quarters it is just now fashion- 
able to do it. " What you say, O prophet, is a 
poor and pitiable dream," they say. " This idea 
of a divine word about the world, and of a divine 
purpose accomplishing itself in the world, is a 
figment, a chimera.'' 

" There is no God," says a certain sort of sci- 
ence ; exclaiming with Lalande, " for sixty years 
I have surveyed the heavens, and never as yet 
have I seen him." And again writes Laplace, 
" In my heaven I can find no God." Of course, 
therefore, this non-existent being can have no 
thought or word about the world. 

" First and foremost we must strike at the idea 
of God," says Socialism, arranging its combina- 
tions, and burning its Paris, and seizing the 



CONQUERING PROMISE. 163 

railroads Avith its riots. " The thought of God 
we must wrench out of people's minds. He is 
nothing but the bug-a-boo, with which to frighten 
children. We neither wish to know, or care for 
what may be, his thought about the world." 

And the prevailing skepticism of the time has 
bitten with its chill many hearts which would 
not dare or wish to call themselves unchristian. 
Like the virgins in the parable, their lamps of 
faith and hope are going out, and they wonder 
whether, after all, the God in whom their fathers 
trusted has spoken any mighty and triumphant 
word, or is pushing on any overcoming purpose 
about the world. 

But, though you may sleep all day, the sun 
still shines. Though to you the mountain may 
be draped in mists, it has not unloosened its gran- 
ite roots. Though you may be caught amid the 
swirling snows, the spring is hastening on. 
Though you may deny, or though you may 
doubt, God's word about the world has been 
spoken, and every passing year is hurrying to 
add its syllable to its magnificent significance. 



164 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Glance at a single illustration. I open Meri- 
vale's " History of the Romans Under the Em- 
pire." I read that the first and great Emperor 
Augustus, toward the close of his reign, drew up 
with his own hand a complete survey of the vast 
dominion over which he swayed the sceptre. 
This Breviarium, as he called it, he placed in the 
hands of the Vestal Virgins, to be delivered to 
the Senate and his successor after his death. It 
was a succinct but authentic statement of all the 
resources of the Roman people. It detailed the 
state of the naval and militarv forces : the num- 
ber of the citizens, and subjects, and allies ; the 
condition of the provinces and dependencies; the 
political system of each one of the various com- 
munities which went to make up the empire; the 
amount of the public revenues ; the proceeds of 
every import ; the expenses of the general gov- 
ernment. 

When I read of such a consummate govern- 
mental compendium, I am anxious to know where 
the great emperor found the accurate information 
upon which to base it all. 



CONQUERING PROMISE. 165 

I find that at three several times during his 
great reign he ordered a complete census and 
taxing of his vast empire. Reading of this Bre- 
viariwn, I see the reason for his careful census. 
He wished to organize his empire. He wished to 
know what the sceptre he wielded meant. He 
wished to find out the directest and most con- 
trolling way of government. He wished to dis- 
cover what, in the way of revenue, he could de- 
pend on. He was emperor. He was statesman. 
Such was his statesman-like thought and pur- 
pose. 

All this is very interesting and important. It 
is a most luminous and notew^orthy fact of his- 
tory. 

But a new and very tremendous significance is 
given to this wise purpose of the great emperor 
when I find that, though Augustus on the world's 
topmost throne was all unconscious of it, God 
used it and overruled it for the greatest accom- 
plishment of his word about the world. 

What knew the lifted emperor, or what cared 
he about a peasant baby who was born on some 



166 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

night in a cattle's cavern, in the little Jewish 
town of Bethlehem? It Avas not a very sur- 
prising thing that a baby should be born ; and 
Bethlehem was one of the smallest hamlets in 
one of the obscurest corners of that world-in- 
cluding empire. But this child was God mani- 
fest in the flesh. And it w^as God's word about 
this child, that he should first see the light in 
Bethlehem — in no other spot. But she who was 
to be the mother of the child was dwelling then 
in Nazareth in Galilee, a town separated from 
Bethlehem by a difficult and distant journey. 
But she was forced to Bethlehem at just the 
birth-time of the child. What forced her there ? 
One of the orders of census-taking and of taxing 
of this emperor. 

He was one of the lesser prophets. He was one 
who did not fill a very large place either in emi- 
nence or in service. But this was the word of God, 
through this prophet, about the divine child, said 
seven hundred years before the birth-time: "But 
thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little 
among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee 



CONQUERING PROMISE. 167 

shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler 
in Israel ; whose goings forth have been from of 
old, from everlasting." 

And the Koman Emperor, the greatest and 
most exalted man of his age, thinking only about 
discovering the resources of his empire, thinking 
only about gathering data for his Breviarium, is 
the unconscious and freely acting, yet still com- 
pelled agent to pour into that word of God the 
most perfect significance of fulfillment. The 
Koman Emperor is the subject of the word of 
God. The Eoman Emperor is the tributary to 
Jesus Christ. 

Now, in the light of this conquering promise, 
it is certainly right and fair for me to generalize 
to other promises, and to be sure that they are 
just as conquering. The world is not at loose 
ends. God leads. God has spoken. No least 
word of his shall fail or fall. Here is courage 
for me. If I work with God, I cannot meet de- 
feat ; I must be on the winning side of things. 



PKAYEES DENIED YET ANSWEKED. 

/^ OD is not distant from the world. God has 
^^ not flung the world from his creative hand, 
to let it get on as best it may. The chasm 
between this world and the throne of God is not 
so wide that he who fills immensity with his pres- 
ence cannot be both on that throne and in the 
world. The creative hand of God is now his 
providential hand. The life of the world is life 
to which God lends energy. The breath of the 
new spring is the breath of God. The petal of a 
lily is a canvas for his color. The sweep of a 
sparrow's wing and the moment of a sparrow's 
fall are not matters too slight for his notice and 
appointment. As James Martineau has spoken 
of it: "God is excluded from neither air, nor 
earth, nor sea, nor souls. There is a mystic 
implication of his nature with ours, and ours with 

his; his serenity amid our griefs; his sanctity 
(168) 



PRAYERS DENIED YET ANSWERED. 169 

amid our guilt ; his wakefulness amid our sleep ; 
his life through our death ; his silence amid our 
stormy force." " Thou hast beset me behind and 
before and laid thine hand upon me," exclaims 
the Psalmist. 

If, then, God be in such neighborhood with us, 
prayer cannot be irrational. He is within whis- 
per reach, within thought reach. Nay, if we will 
accept the Bible statement, we must believe that 
the divine attention is alert to catch the voice of 
prayer. God waits for it, searches for it, solicits 
it. The Father seeketh for the worship of those 
who worship him in spirit and in truth. The 
prayer of the upright is his delight, and also 
prayer is answered. The Psalms are full of the 
paeans of this praise : '* I cried unto the Lord with 
my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill." 
" Blessed be the Lord, because he hath heard the 
voice of my supplications." Christ asks : " Do 
you think you are more tender in your father- 
hood than the Heavenly Father is in his ; or 
what man is thereof you who, if his* son ask 

bread, w^ill he give him a stone, or, if he ask a 
15 



170 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

fish, will he give him a serpent ? If ye, then, 
being evil, know how to give good gifts to your 
children, how much more shall your Father 
which is in heaven give good things to them that 
ask him/' 

But while it is true that the besetting God 
delights in prayer, and that often the answer 
comes swift as the stroke of the wing of Gabriel, 
or suddenly as the knock of a disimprisoned 
Peter upon the door of the house of Mary, it is 
also just as true that sometimes there is a black 
and wide and weary chasm between the prayer 
and the answer of it. The prayer goes up, but 
the pain goes on. The cry goes forth, but the 
burden galls and crushes down. The ear of God 
seems heavy and his hands idle, while the heart, 
sick with hope deferred, and weary with its 
groanings, seems to stand on an iron earth, and 
to stretch the hands of a useless supplication 
toward a brazen heaven. 

Take a Scriptural illustration. There was a 
family in Bethany which Jesus loved. Many a 
time, from the conflicts with the Scribes and 



PRAYERS DENIED YET ANSWERED. 171 

Pharisees, from the weariness of his pilgrimage, 
from the hardness of his i^overty, like a vessel, 
storm-beaten, putting into a quiet harbor, he had 
sought grateful refuge here. It is only lately 
that he has been a most welcome guest. He has 
gone now into Perea, beyond the Jordan. 
During his absence, -Lazarus, the brother, and 
support of the household, sickens. The disease 
runs rapidly to a crisis ; death is evidently in 
dangerous neighborhood. Xaturally enough, the 
sisters turn in their extremity to the Lord they 
love. A messenger is hurriedly dispatched to 
Jesus. He bears from the sisters as true and 
trustful and beautiful a prayer as was ever 
offered. It is full of a most touching confidence. 
" Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick." It is but 
a day's journey from Bethabara to Bethany. 
Certainly, there will be no tarrying. Certainly, 
their Lord will not wait now, when the sincerest 
faith frames his own love into gentle argument 
for haste. 

But he does tarry, even though the sisters 
watch there for him ; even though Lazarus, 



172 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

whom he loves, is sick. The prayer goes up to 
the Lord of power and of life; but it comes 
back with empty hands. The sisters attend 
their brother, but they are helpless. Here is 
Lazarus dying, and there is Jesus waiting over 
in Bethabara. Death comes on quick and con- 
quering. "Now, when he had heard that 
Lazarus was sick, he abode two days still in the 
same place where he was." The very need at 
Bethany seems to be a reason for his leisure at 
Bethabara; and when at last he does come, 
slowly moving on — consuming twice the time 
needful for the journey — as far as Lazarus is 
concerned, he might have stayed at Bethabara. 
When he reaches Bethany, Lazarus has been 
four days buried; and, in that hot Eastern 
climate, corruption has long ago set in. 

Well, does not this action of our Lord bring 
into view another fact concerning prayer — that 
sometimes it seems to be a void and useless 
thing? The Lord waits; he does not hasten. 
You dispatch your prayer; but, meanwhile, 
Lazarus dies, and must be buried. Your trouble 



PRAYERS DENIED YET ANSWERED. 173 

greatens; your distress gets more distressful; 
your pain pierces with sharper pangs; your 
thorn in the flesh grows larger and cuts deeper ; 
and, though you wait and watch for answer, like 
those who watch for the morning, all that is left 
you is just to watch and wait, saying over, as 
again and again Martha and Mary murmured 
each to each : " Oh ! if our Lord had been 
here, our brother had not died." But your 
Lord is not there. He lingers at Bethabara, and 
all you can do is to moan in helpless anguish, 
in the cruel companionship of your distress. 

It is a very real experience in life, Mary and 
Martha bemoaning their dead brother in 
Bethany and Jesus abiding in Bethabara. It is 
John Bunyan's " Valley of the Shadow of 
Death," where the paths are steep, and the rocks 
are hard, and the sky is black, and the spaces 
are thronged with tormenting shapes of doubt, 
* and God seems nowhere. 

The question arises, "What is the Divine 

Reason behind such experience ? " If God has 

no benignant reason, he is cruel. Possibly we 
15* 



174 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

may discover such. Let us look into the chap- 
ter which holds the story, and attempt it. 

Here is one reason. Our Lord sometimes waits 
in Bethabara, when we need him in Bethany, 
that he may furnish us with larger reason for 
faith in him. This was the explanation of our 
Lord's absence from the dying-bed of Lazarus. 
He said to his disciples : " I am glad for your 
sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye might 
believe." No life can get on without faith. 
Columbus waited eighteen years for three small 
vessels, not as large or as strong as your common 
coasting schooners, with which to search out 
America ; but he believed that somewhere amid 
the western waters there was an undiscovered 
continent ; and that faith sustained him, and by 
it he conquered. It is impossible that life 
accomplish anything in any direction, except it 
be able to fling the grappling anchor flukes of 
its faith into somewhat worthy. Every one of 
the Bible-roll of heroes, in the eleventh chapter 
of Hebrews, had been a nerveless and defeated 
man had he not had faith. " This man will do 



PRAYERS DENIED YET ANSWERED. 175 

somewhat/' said one of a great Reformer, 
" because he believes somewhat." But there can 
be no faith, except there be an underlying 
reason. Reason must be the pedestal upon 
which faith stands, that it may gain wider vision 
and discern substantial shapes in the shadowy 
future. Faith without reason is fanaticism — 
blind, unreasonable, dogged impulse. Columbus 
had reason for his faith, that somewhere a 
western continent balanced the eastern, because 
of the globular shape of the earth, just then 
proven, and because of other geographical and 
scientific facts. Now, a religious life is one 
impelled and inspired by a faith in a personal, 
loving, guarding God. The soul is w-eak and 
perplexed, and dim of eye, and feeble of foot 
and arm ; but the soul — looking out from itself 
toward God by faith, discerns his strength, his 
clear knowledge, the promise of his uplifting, 
lives not in itself, but in its God ; takes to itself 
the power and light and love of God ; and, like 
a child, sure that it is safe and supplied because 
it is folded in the mother's arms, rejoices in a 



176 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

rapturous security, because it is gathered into 
the Infinite Bosom. But is it not true that God 
must somehow show himself to be a God like 
this, before your faith or mind can fasten on 
him? 

Precisely such ground for faith did not our 
Lord yield his disciples and these sisters through 
his tarrying at Bethabara? Lazarus was dead. 
He had been four days lying in that tomb. 
Death had begun to wanton on him. The sisters 
had sent forth their prayer ; but he had tarried. 
But in our Lord's triumph over the dark death 
of Lazarus, through the power of his resurrec- 
tion, did he not disclose to these, and, through 
them, to us, indestructible reason for victorious 
faith ? " To the intent ye might believe.'' Some- 
times our Lord tarries, not that we may in the 
end believe him less, but that we may believe 
him more. 

Then, too, sometimes our Lord tarries at Beth- 
abara, when we need him at Bethany, because 
thus he is enabled to do better for us than ive 
have asked. God is no niggardly giver. He 



PRAYERS DENIED YET ANSWERED. 177 

does not stint the fullness of his answer to the 
pitiable measure of our poor prayer. He would 
do for us exceedingly abundantly above all thac 
we can ask or think. How much larger the 
answer to the prayer of these sisters than the 
measure of the prayer itself I They asked but 
that he should heal Lazarus. He would give 
them, not simply Lazarus healed from sickness, 
but Lazarus made a conqueror over the great 
conqueror. He would flood their souls with the 
streams of consolation of which that mighty mir- 
acle was the fountain. What w^ere death now to 
Martha and to Mary, and to the disciples, if 
death were but a thrall beneath the absolute 
sway of their loving Lord ? But these stricken 
ones at Bethany entered into this magnificence 
of divine response through their Lord's delay. 

But, also, our Lord sometimes stays in Beth- 
abara, when we need him in Bethany, because we 
can do more to glorify him, if he delay, than if 
he should come, " This sickness is for the glory 
of God, that the Son of God might be glorified 
thereby." Lazarus, through his w^eakness and 



178 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

death, did more for Jesus than he could have 
done had he preached the gospel in all the world. 
Charlotte Elliot, imprisoned in her sick chamber, 
but singing, " Just as J. am, without one plea," 
did more for her Lord's gospel than she could 
have accomplished, possibly, had he dis-impris- 
oned her. Looking back upon it now, from the 
heavenly heights, John Bunyan must see that 
those twelve years in Bedford Jail, in w^hich im- 
prisonment yielded him leisure to dream and 
write of the journey from the City of Destruction, 
were more fruitful for the triumph of his Lord's 
truth than any years of free and active preaching 
could have been. To glorify him, is the Ciiristian 
aim. Sometimes Bethabara keeps our Lord from 
our Bethany, because, through his absence, his 
glory can more shiningly disclose itself. 

So here the prayer which seemed denied was 
yet answered in the best and largest way. Let 
not waiting hearts at Bethany fail then utterly, 
if the Lord do tarry at Bethabara. 

"All thino-s work to^rether for erood." Won- 

o o o 

derful Scripture! And yet how plainly may it 



PRAYERS DENIED YET ANSWERED. 179 

be seen in this narrative ! The sickening, dying 
brother ; the helpless sisters ; the tomb ; the cor- 
ruption even — all wrought for the good of a 
firmer basis for faith; of a larger answer than 
they had ever dreamed ; of the sunrise of his 
power upon the night of human death. 



RESOUECE IN TROUBLE. 

T ET us take note of and profit by the ex- 
-^ ample of the early Christians in their 
trouble. Peter had healed the lame man at 
the gate called Beautiful. The miracle and 
his preaching had stirred the multitude afresh. 
Many had believed. The Sanhedrim had ar- 
raigned the apostle and his companion John. 
They had commanded them not to speak at all, 
nor teach henceforward in the name of Jesus. 
" We cannot but speak the things which we 
have seen and heard," had been their answer; 
and then, let go, they had gone to their own 
company. 

It was no slight thing to brave the anger of 
the Jewish leaders. It meant, to those w^ho 
dared to do it, oppression, imprisonment, prob- 
able death. But these early Christians had a 

resource in the danger and trouble gathering 
(180) 



RESOURCE IN TROUBLE. 181 

around them. Let us think a moment of their 
resource. 

"And when they had heard what Peter and 
John had said, they lifted up their voice to 
God with one accord, and said : Lord, thou art 
God, which hast made heaven and earth, and the 
sea, and all that in them is." 

Their resource was in a God Almighty, the 

Maker of heaven and earth and sea. It is o;ood 

sometimes to think of the affluence of the Divine 

Power. The sun is the central object in our 

heavens. His diameter is eleven hundred and 

twelve times that of our own earth. His 

surface is twelve thousand, six hundred and 

eleven times that of our own earth. His light 

is twenty-two thousand million times that of the 

most brilliant star. That sun is the source of 

the light and heat by means of which all the 

processes of life are carried on in this earth of 

ours. And yet the two thousand three hundred 

millionth part of the force radiated by the sun 

is all our earth can grasp of his lighting and 

heating rays streaming out in all directions. It 
16 



182 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

is but by this pitiable fraction of the sun's 
mighty power that all the earth's work is done. 
The Sci-ipture figure of our God is that he is a 
Sun. We have a right to press the figure. So 
syperaboimding is his power, that the smallest 
fraction of it is enough for our utmost need. 

These early Christians had a resource in an 
all-wise God, A thousand years before, David, 
in the second Psalm, had prophesied this very 
trouble. This troubling storm against thy Christ 
and Truth neither surprises nor disappoints thee. 
Thou saw^est what must be, and this trouble too 
thou sawest. Disastrous as it seems to us, it is 
shining clear to thee. Thou art all-wise. 

These early Christians found a resource in an 
all-controlling God, " For to do Avhatsoever thy 
hand and thy counsel determined before to be 
done." Mystery here certainly. That old prob- 
lem of the divine control and of the freeness 
of the human Avill emerges. We may not at- 
tempt to clear the thick mists away. We 
cannot do it. But we may anchor to the 
great helpful truth. God controls. Every- 



RESOURCE IN TROUBLE. 183 

thing moves along the line of his great pur- 
pose. Not the wildest rage of men can slip 
that predetermined track. 

These early Christians found a resource in 
this almighty, all-wise, all-controlling God, laid 
hold of by their prayer. "And when they heard 
that, they lifted up their voices to God with one 
accord.'^ There was no thought with them that 
such a God could not and would not answer. 
No breath so prevailing and so real to them 
as praying breath. 

These early Christians found a resource, too, 
in self-surrender. They asked, not so much to 
be delivered from the storm, as that they 
mio^ht carrv themselves worthilv while it rao:ed. 
They asked, not so much for sunnier skies and 
smoother paths, as that they might be saved 
from faltering, though the clouds might crowd 
and the rocks cut their persistent feet. It was 
the noblest of prayers they uttered: that they 
might give themselves to God's will, and get 
that carried on at any hazard. "Grant unto 
thy servants that with all boldness they may 



184 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

speak thy word." It was as though they had 
said : " Lord, we accept the trouble ; it is not 
about this blustering Jewish tempest we are so 
much concerned; but we are anxious that it 
should not blow away our faith and courage. 
Save us, O Lord, from that." 

This, then, was the resource of these early 
Christians in their trouble: self-surrender to 
the will of the prayer-moved, all-controlling, 
all-wise, almighty God. This is resource; for 
it is an utter and intelligent taking sides with 
God, It is transmuting trouble into blessed 
grace. It is refusing to be scared from God by 
trouble ; it is rather determining that trouble 
shall shut us but the closer up to God. 

Let us use the resource. It is one thing, and 
it is a too frequent thing, to let trouble make a 
chasm between ourselves and God. That is to 
bring upon ourselves a terrible helplessness. It 
is another thing to so manage our trouble that 
it shall force us to take sides with God in it; 
and then trouble is baffled, and we are kept ; for 
we are embosomed in the Infinite." 



ALL THINGS WORKING TOGETHER 
FOR GOOD. 

T)LINY, the Roman philosopher, had a friend 
-*- Correlius, to whom he was devotedly 
attached. The death of this friend was to Pliny 
the bitterest bereavement. He searched every- 
where for comfort, but could find it neither in his 
philosophy, nor amid the thronging gods of his 
religion. His appeal for comfort, in a letter 
which he writes to another friend, is one of the 
most touching passages in ancient literature. 
" Speak comfort to me. Tell me not that Corre- 
lius was old and infirm, and that his death was 
by natural law. All this I know. But supply 
me with some reflections that are uncommon and 
resistless ; that neither the wisdom of the world, 
nor the precepts of the philosophers can teach 
me. For all that I have heard and all that I 

have read occur to me of themselves; but all 
16-^ (185) 



186 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

these are by far too weak to support me under 
such affliction." 

The question is, is there anywhere such uncom- 
mon and resistless comfort as that which Pliny 
so passionately calls for ? Has any such ever come 
from anywhere to smitten men and women ? Is 
there any underlying and comj^rehensive and per- 
vasive truth, which can bleach, at least to some 
extent, the black and frowning face of sorrow ; 
which can take, in anywise, the pang out of the 
pain ? Suppose that Pliny had written to the Apos- 
tle Paul instead of his friend, Calestrius Tiro, ask- 
ing comfort — could Paul have given it to him ? 
Certainly Paul could. This he would have said 
to him, for he did say it to other people of Pliny's 
time, just as tried and buffeted as Pliny was : 
*' Give yourself to God ; choose him supremely ; 
love him, and then be sure of this — all things 
work together for good to them that love God." 
All things — that is as comprehensive as possible ; 
that includes bereavements, disasters, pains, trou- 
bles, diseases, crampings of poverty, anything, 
everything. We are to know that anything and 



WORKING TOGETHER FOR GOOD. 187 

everything works together for good to them that 
love God. Here certainly is constant and ever- 
coming comfort. 

It is at the point of faith that the main diffi- 
culty lies. If, but with a faith as sure as that 
with which we seize the fact that the sun will 
rise to-morrow morning, we could seize this fact, 
we should then be settled and stilled in a comfort, 
the steady and joyful heart of which no arm of 
disaster, how bony and long soever, could reach 
possibly. We should be, as to our inner hearts, 
hung and swung as are compasses on shipboard ; 
so that in whatever way the storm may pitch and 
toss the vessel, the compass maintains its level. 

For the help of our faith, in this strong conso- 
lation, let us take an instance from the life of 
Paul himself. It was with Paul a persistent 
prayer and purpose that he might preach the 
Lord Jesus in the capital city of the world. 
Cities then, as now, were the fountains of power. 
Paul was the apostle to the Gentiles, and Rome 
was the heart and spring of Gentile influence. 
A church had been gathered there, which needed 



188 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

apostolic training. For many reasons to Paul, 
the divine call seemed to be sounding toward 
Rome. 

But between Paul and Rome there were lifted 
the hostile hands of many obstacles. It was a 
long and difficult journey from Corinth, round 
by Jerusalem, to Rome. It was an expensive 
journey. Dangers of all sorts thronged it. 
Toward Paul, there was peculiar danger from 
Jewish hatred. When he announced his inten- 
tion of going to Jerusalem, and from thence to 
Rome, it was at this point of Jewish hostility that 
the implorations of his Christian brethren made 
loving assault. Besides, the Holy Ghost wit- 
nessed that in every city bonds and imprison- 
ments awaited him. Then, too, having reached 
Rome, obstacles would not cease. There Jewish 
cunning would seek to circumvent him, and 
Jewish spite destroy him, except he could be 
somehow under the special protection of the gov- 
ernment. But how could he, hated and slandered 
as he was, gain such protection ? 

Paul starts upon his journey; and, on the way. 



WORKING TOGETHER FOR GOOD. 189 

at first sight, there seem to be nothing but 
hindrances and disastei^s for him. There is the 
mob at Jerusalem. There is the trial before 
Felix at Csesarea, which comes to nothing. 
There are the two weary years of imprisonment 
at that city. There is, at last, the appeal to 
Caesar. Then there are the voyage and the 
shipwreck and the delay. And when, after 
years of waiting, Paul finds himself passing the 
gates of Rome, he enters them a prisoner. 

But look at these seeming hindrances and 
disasters in their deejDer and real relation to the 
furtherance of the apostolic purpose. The two 
years' imprisonment issues in the appeal to 
Caesar. That appeal makes him a sacred person 
in the eye of the Roman law. Ko Jew can 
touch him. Iso mob can seize him with violent 
hand. The journey is long and expensive ; but 
forced to appeal to Caesar, he takes the journey 
to the throne of the Emperor at the exjDense of 
the Roman government. The shipwreck is 
bafiling, but his courage and calm self-poise win 
the defending admiration of Julius, the Centu- 



190 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

rion ; so that when he reaches Rome, Julius 
makes special exertion in his behalf, and gains 
for him the privilege, not enjoyed ^vithout a 
special order, to live in his own hired lodging, 
and to freely see his friends. In Rome, his trial 
is delayed two years, and during all this time 
the strong arm of the government shields him 
from both Jew and Gentile. His imprisonment 
gives him the constant, yet changing audience 
of the one soldier who guards him; thus the 
saints begin to multiply in Caesar's household. 
So, too, as he writes to the Philippians, his very 
bonds help on the preaching of his Lord. Also, 
his imprisonment gives him leisure to write the 
great Epistles to the Ephesians, to the Colossians, 
to the Philippians, to Philemon. Paul sings no 
such joyful notes of praise as those which, in the 
Epistle to the Philippians, go soaring out of this 
very Roman imprisonment. It is as though God 
had given him, in the utmost way, his heart's 
desire. 

That which is to be noted is, that his desire 
w^as given him through the very things which, at 



WORKING TOGETHER FOR GOOD. 191 

first sight, seemed to wear such hostile faces. 
Every one of them showed itself at last benig- 
uaiuly working together for his good. "And 
Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired 
house, and received all that came unto him, 
preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching 
those things which concerned the Lord Jesus 
Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding 
him.'' 

Let Its get grip on the mighty truth — all things 
do work together for our good, if we but love 
God. Here is ever-comino; comfort. 



THE MEN NEEDED. 

T THINK Stephen is an example of them. 
-■- He was a man possessing the courage of 
conviction. Of one thing he was sure — that 
Jesus was Messiah — gathering into substance 
and fulfillment all the shadowy and prophetic 
Mosaic past. Being sure, it was his duty to 
herald this evangel. It was not his to be dis- 
creet or polite about it. It was his to tell the 
immense truth out in all places and at any time. 
The Jewish Sanhedrim needed to know it as 
soon and as certainly as any. Standing there a 
prisoner before them, it was still his to tell 
them; and he does tell them calmly, lovingly, 
but with the strong courage which springs from 
an assured conviction. Whether the issue to 
him shall be life or death, it is his to be true 
to his Lord and to himself. 

Martyrs like Stephen, in God's good provi- 
(192) 



THE MEN NEEDED. 193 

dence, ^ve need never be. The true faith has 
drawn the teeth of persecution in these days 
and in this land. But men like Stephen there 
is need that we now be and ought to be — men 
of convictions, men of the courage of con- 
victions, men who ^vill steadfastly bear their 
testimony. 

The old Jewish Sanhedrim is dead long ago ; 
but there are still other Sanhedrims, before 
which every man must be summoned. There 
are Sanhedrims of imbelief. Their council 
chambers are croAvded just now thick about 
our lives. Many of those who call themselves 
the learned of the earth take their seats within 
them. They will tell you that your religion is 
a myth, a figment, a delusion. You will meet 
them in society. You will read their utterances 
too often in the daily press. They have a charmed 
word with Avhich just now they fling their spell ; 
that word is " liberal." He w'ho can doubt the 
most is the man most liberal; and not to be 
liberal in their sense, in their thought, is to 

be mean and to be a fool. Well, the Lord 
17 



194 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

needs before this modern Sanhedrim men of 
the courage of conviction ; men Avho ^voul(l 
rather be stigmatized as illiberal than yield 
their truth, or even allow that it is misty with 
perhapses; men to whom God, and the Bible, 
and the atoning Christ mean something ; men 
who are ready to acknowledge in any presence, 
and under any circumstances, that they do carry 
the most awful and tremendous meanings. The 
need for Stephens is not yet done. 

There is the Sanhedrim of business. Here, 
too, is needed the courage of conviction and 
brave witnessing — men who will say, in the 
presence of that Sanhedrim : " You may have 
your tricks of trade ; you may have your ques- 
tionable methods, through which the line be- 
tween the w^rong and right tremulously wavers ; 
you may stain your hands with badly gotten 
gold, and call things, which ought to be desig- 
nated wrong, only sharp and clever ; but we are 
men who stand for the Lord Christ in bank and 
store and street, as well as in church on Sunday ; 
and a barcrain which we cann%)t make with the 



THE MEN NEEDED. 195 

clear vision of his eye upon us is a bargain 
which Ave will not make, though you assure us 
it is swollen with millions for us, waiting to be 
brought to birth." 

There is the Sanhedrim of the family and of 
companionship, before which the daily test is 
tried whether the mind w^hich was in Christ 
Jesus shall be really the mind which is in us ; 
whether we shall forget ourselves as he forgot 
himself; whether we shall be courageous with 
his love, and long suffering with his patience, 
and sweet and tender with his loveliness, and 
open handed with his charity. 

And the Lord has need of Stephens still, who 
shall be true to him ; who shall stand the test- 
ing ; whose lives shall be significant for him ; 
and who, though they may never be brought to 
die by stoning, as Stephen was, for Jesus' sake, 
shall yet be, for the sake of that same Jesus, 
courageous with the martyrdom of daily life 
in sick rooms and in toiling for the poor, and 
in the service of the Sunday-school, and along 
all the endless avenues of duty, thoughtless of 



196 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

self that tbey may remember him, and may 
cause others to remember him. 

It shall not be needful that we die Stephen's 
death ; but it is thoroughly needful that we do, 
in spirit and in deed, live Stephen's life of cour- 
ageous faithfulness to Jesus. Such men are 
needed. 



HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN. 

T KNOW I am a sinner," he said. "I feel 
■^ the burden of my sin. I want to be a 
Christian, but I don't know how to be. I am 
like a man feeling around in the dark. I don't 
know where to step." 

" Do you believe that the Lord Jesus tells 
you the truth, and will never deceive you ? " I 
asked. 

" Certainly I do," he answered. " I haven't 
the slightest doubt about that." 

" You are absolutely sure," I inquired, *' that 
the Lord Jesus cannot lie ? " 

" Absolutely sure," he said. 

" Well, now," I replied, " since you are so cer- 
tain that Christ never can deceive you, why 
won't you take him exactly at his word ? He 
tells you these words, 'Him that cometh unto 

me, I will in no wise cast out.' Now, coming is 
17* (197) 



198 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

the yielding up of your sin, forsaking it, conse- 
crating your soul to him. Don't you suppose 
that if you do your part of it, it is perfectly cer- 
tain that Christ will do his part — receive you — 
never cast you out ? '' 

" I think it must be so," he answered. 

" Well, now," I asked again, " as far as you 
know yourself, do you thus come? "• 

He waited a minute, and then said solemnly : 

"As far as I know myself, I do." 

" Can you not, then," I answered, "just believe 
that promise, let your faith festen on that word 
as a word for you, * I will in no wise cast out ' ? " 

There was absolute stillness for a moment, then 
the man looked up suddenly and exclaimed : 

"Why, is that all?" 

" That is all," I answered. 

" Why," said he slowly, as if speaking to him- 
self, " then — I think — I must be a Christian." 

" My brother, you are a Christian," I answered 
joyfully. 

Thus did this man become then and there a 
Christian. 



HOW TO BE A CHRISTIAN. 199 

Can \Ye not all do thus and be saved ? 

Said James Durham, a minister in Glasgow, on 
his death-bed, to a friend : 

" Brother, for all that I have preached and 
written, there is but one Scripture I can remem- 
ber or dare to grip to. Tell me if I dare lay the 
weight of my salvation upon it. * Him that 
cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.' " 

" You may depend upon it, though you had a 
thousand salvations at hazard," was the answer. 

That " ill no wise " is a double negative : I 
will not, no, I will not cast out ; and in what- 
ever darkness, or sense of sinfulness, or agony of 
remorse, or out of whatever depth of evil, the 
soul coming to Christ lays grip to that, that soul 
is saved infallibly — and not life, nor death, nor 
angels, nor principalities, nor powders, nor things 
to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any creature, 
shall be able to separate that soul from the love 
of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord. Com- 
ing and thus resting on his word, that is being a 
Christian. The personal contact with the per- 
sonal Christ — that is true religion. 



DIVINE LOVE. 

OUTSIDE the Bible, you find revelation 
enough of law, but little of love. Some 
time since, looking out of my study window, I 
saw a blind man sitting on the stone steps oppo- 
site. I had often seen him led along the streets, 
picking up a living by peddling his little wares. 
Through the adaptation of our healthy eyes to 
the delicately smiting waves of the sunbeam, 
you and I get personal consciousness of the law 
of vision. Through the damage that has some- 
how come to that man's eyeballs, so that they are 
no more susceptible to the smiting sunbeams, 
that poor man gets sad personal consciousness of 
the law of want of vision. For him, there is but 
the blackness of darkness, whether the sun rise, 
or whether it set ; but from no law of vision, or 
of the want of it, can you or he get knowledge 

of an Infinite and Beating Heart, which broods 
(200) 



DIVINE LOVE. 201 

and yearns and blesses, in the light and in the 
darkness too ; which in our affliction is itself af- 
flicted ; which seeks to pour the tides of an un- 
tiring afiection round every creature; which opens 
itself for refuge to every struggler. 

It is law there — healthv eveballs and smitino^ 
sunbeams, and so vision ; damaged eyebalJs and 
smiting sunbeams, and never a glimmer of light, 
though the sun rise. But in the Bible you have 
an added revelation of the Infinite and Personal 
Love which, while it will not break law, will 
still use it for our help and blessing ; which will 
even turn the darkness and the sorrow into min- 
istry of spiritual and moral good. 

Perhaps there are no Bible words which tell 
of this love better than the following: ''Having 
loved his own which were in the world, he loved 
them unto the end." He loved them unto the 
end in this sense : that no hazard of personal cost 
whatever stopped the flowing of his love. When 
I was a boy, I used to read over and over again 
the story of a father and a mother and a child 
caught amid the Xew Hampshire mountains in 



202 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

a terrific snow-storm. The way was lost ; the 
storm was blinding ; the cold was bitter. Far in 
the distance, there was a gleam in a farm-house. 
The mother and the child could not go another 
rod, they were so exhausted. The father made 
for the distant light, to seek assistance; found it ; 
brought it with him ; found the child warm and 
living ; found the mother stiff and dead ; for she 
had, in the bitter cold, stripped herself of her 
own garments, to wrap them round the child. 
That mother, having loved her own, loved unto 
the end. In this sense exactly does the Divine 
Love keep flowing on. It stops at no cost what- 
ever. 

It stopped not at the cost of the incarnation. 
Then the Creator, as Mrs. Browning sings it, 

Was rent asunder from his first glory, 
And cast away on his own w^orld. 

Then Infiniteness circumscribed itself with finite- 
ness. Then he who in the beginning was, and 
was with God, and was God, humbled himself, 
and became found in fashion as a man. To tell 
the meaning of that condescension, words fail, 



DIVINE LOVE. 203 

and human thought is as a laggard snail com- 
pared with the eagle's unhindered flight. 

It stopped not at the cost of the temptation, 
when Divinity lowered itself to meet and master, 
in human weakness and temptability, the devil, 
who hounds men like a roaring lion, seeking 
whom he may devour. 

It stopped not at the cost of an awful and mys- 
terious contact with the sinfulness to which man 
had given himself. ^' Su23pose," another says, in 
words most eloquent, ** that the purest woman in 
this town, the most sensitive and scrupulous, 
moved by a sense of sisterhood, and by a loving 
pity, gathers up all her life, and goes and lives 
amid the lowest and the most brutal and the most 
foul savages that this world can contain. As she 
enters that life, she leaves her own life behind. 
She accepts their life ; everything, except their 
wickedness, she makes her own. She sacrifices 
her fastidiousness every day. She finds herself 
the victim of habits which are the consequences 
of long years of sin. Xo sensibility that is not 
shocked ; no fine, pure taste that is not wounded. 



204 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Her common human nature asserts itself every 
day ; but the very depth of the union into ^vhich 
she comes with them by her pity, makes her all 
the more sensitive to the horror of their life. 
Their sin is awful to her, not only because of her 
own purity, but because of the keen understand- 
ing of its awfulness w^hich comes from her pro- 
found oneness of nature with these sinners. She 
cannot stand far off, and look at them and work 
for them at a safe distance. She is one of them, 
in her common humanity. In every foul wick- 
edness of theirs, she suffers. She bears their sins, 
a heavy burden, on her heart." May not such 
words as these aid our conception of what that 
suffering was, from the cost of which, through 
love of man, he held not back w^hen he shared 
our nature and came into contact with its sin, and, 
shutting heaven's gates behind him, placed the 
feet of his purity upon this defiled earth of ours ? 
That Divine Love stopped not either at the 
cost of Calvary. It claimed the cross. It laid 
itself upon that world-atoning altar. It took 
man's place in the frowning presence of a violated 



DIYIXE LOVE. 205 

law. It sundered itself from the Father's smile, 
which had been its life. It piled upon its shoul- 
ders the weight and penalty of human sin. It 
passed into that crisis of sacrifice, when Jesus 
cried : " My God ! my God ! why hast thou for- 
saken me?" It broke its heart. It died. 

Nay, I am sure that that Divine Love stopped 
not, either, at the cost of a certain perpetual sac- 
rifice for us ; for I remember that that dip into 
human nature was not a transitory one for thirty- 
three brief years, and then a passage out of it. 
After the atonement had been accomplished, and 
the resurrection had set the seal of infinite vic- 
tory and approval upon it, I remember that the 
Lord Christ did not shuffle off our human nature 
as something he had done with, and which could 
be left now to get on by its own forces. I remem- 
ber that he did not rise into his own proper and 
absolute divinity, leaving us behind ; but that 
he carried up into the glory with him our human 
nature ; that he rose and ascended a man, as 
utterly as he was crucified a man ; and that, now 

one with us still, he carries on the work of inter- 
18 



206 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

cession for us. When he gave himself to us in 
the mystery of his incarnation, he gave himself 
to stay among us, to wear our nature fore verm ore, 
to be, unendingly, the incarnate Christ. He is 
Christ the glorified, indeed ; but he is still Christ 
Avearing the glorified human nature. Heaven 
robs him not of brotherhood with us ; and what- 
ever sacrifice Deity may have made when it em- 
bosomed itself in our nature, at least that sacri- 
fice remains; for human nature glorified in Christ 
is human nature still. Do you not think of cer- 
tain dim great words of Scripture? Precisely 
what they mean, I know not ; but that they have 
some real, profound significance of loving sacri- 
fice which, perhaps, eternity may disclose to us, 
I am sure : " A lamb slain from the foundation 
of the world.'' Unto such end, then, does the 
Divine Love go, pouring itself out upon us, that 
there is no rock of sacrifice in its path that it 
does not overflow and overwhelm, as tides do 
the pebbles on the beach. 

But there is still another meaning which this 
expression, " unto the end/' may hold. God not 



DIVINE LOVE. 207 

only loves men with a love which will go to the 
end of any sacrifice he must make, but he also 
loves them with a love which will go on until it has 
accomplished the end of his love in them, namely, 
their perfection. That is a poor thought of our 
religion which confines it simply to getting safely 
into heaven. It means much more. It means 
accurate conforming of our characters to the im- 
age of his Son. This love, purposing such an^ 
end, will not hesitate to use all the loving severity 
which may be needful to accomplish it, for there 
is in. real love, necessarily, a certain side and 
element of severity. My child was studying her 
German lesson. It was tangled and difficult. 
The day was bright, and her mates were romping 
in the street. She wanted to miss the lesson and 
join the play ; but, when she asked me if she 
might, my very love forced me to denial. I sav7 
an end for her that she could not yet see — a 
present discipline she needed ; a future grasp of 
mind and culture ; the open gates of a mighty 
literature, into which this tangled lesson was the 
path. She might have thought I loved her more 



208 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

just then, if I had bidden her lay away her 
books and take her pleasant time; but a love 
which saw with larger, other eyes than hers the 
end, compelled the severity of denial. The par- 
able is plain enough. Much that seems jagged 
in our lives is but the expression of God's pure 
love, working toward his end. 

There is a sweet legend of the death of Moses 
in the Talmud. Three angels dig the grave 
upon the mountain, and Moses lies down in it, 
closes his eyelids, presses his hand upon his heart, 
and places his feet in order. Then the Lord calls 
to the soul to come forth and mount to Paradise. 
But the soul has not courage to go. Then he 
promises a place in the highest heaven, beneath 
cherubim and seraphim, who bear up the eternal 
throne ; but still the soul doubts and quakes. 
Then God bent over the face of Moses and kissed 
him ; and the soul leaped up in joy, and went 
forth with the kiss of God to Paradise. So does 
God's love brood over us and variously entice us, 
that, at last, Ave may be lifted to himself. We 
make our own doom if we withstand it. 



MORAL DISINCLINATION. 

"YTTE are told in the Old Scriptures that the 
^ ^ children of Manasseh could not drive 
out the inhabitants of those cities, but the 
Canaanite would dwell in the land. As the 
children of Israel then were, they could not — 
that was true enough ; for they were in no mood 
for enc^ao^ins: in a decisive strucr^le. Thev 

OCT O C~ %/ 

preferred ease to energy. Josephus tells us they 

had grown effeminate. 

Also, lapped in luxury, and thinking more of 

their own pleasant ease than of their nobler 

duty, these Israelites had lost pure and prevailing 

faith in God. Ceasing to fight in accordance 

with God's command, of course they had ceased 

to conquer ; and ceasing thus to use Jehovah's 

promise of victory, of course they had ceased to 

find his promise actual to themselves in the 

further struggles they ought to undertake, but 
18* (209)" 



210 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

did not. And so, letting the weapon of their 
faith rust in a bad non-use, they could not drive 
out these Canaanites from their strongholds. 

Also, lying thus in their enervating ease, and 
losing thus their pure faith in God, the dangers 
and difficulties in the way of the extirpation of 
these Canaanites were to their thought corre- 
spondingly increased. The strongholds, to their 
fearful, ease-loving feeling, grew very strong; 
the fortress perched upon the rocky hill-tops, 
seemed very unassailable; the chariots of iron, 
which, drawn by maddened horses, and horrible 
with long, sharp knives, would come dashing 
down upon their ranks, grew awfully terrible. 

So, looked at from the side of their enervated 
hands, and weakened faith, and exaggerated 
difficulty, it is true that the children of 
Manasseh could not drive out the inhabitants of 
those cities ; and so it would certainly be true 
that the Canaanites would dwell in that land. 

But think, now, of these Israelites marshaled 
and armed for their duty; think of them as 
determined to obey God's command ; think of 



MORAL DISINCLINATION. 211 

them as ready to put Jehovah to the proof, and 
to go forth, risking themselves on his promise. 
Then, certainly, the could not would have 
belonged to the Canaanites. Then there had 
been written another sort of Scripture, like this : 
" And the children of Manasseh would drive out 
the inhabitants of those cities, and the Canaanites^ 
could not dwell in that land." 

So we come to this fact about the mood of 
these Israelites — that the could ?io^ means really 
ivould not; that the real reason of their inability 
was a deep-seated moral disinclination. This 
moral disinclination — at the heart, will not ; on 
the lip, cannot — is the commonest excuse men 
offer for not winning the moral triumphs they 
know they ought. 

It is the commonest excuse of damaged men. 
Now and then, you see advertisements for the 
sale of damaged goods — goods drenched by 
water, smoked by fire, worn by shop-wear — good 
for something, but not good for much. Damaged 
goods have their counterpart in damaged men. 
What bright, promising boys many of them 



212 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

were! How fondly paternal and maternal eyes 
saw high visions of their future! How full, 
standing there on life's threshold, they seemed of 
lifted purpose, of grand courage, of ability to 
be and do! Sweet, generous, noble impulses 
seemed to sway them. Perhaps some trusting 
woman has yielded them herself in marriage; 
perhaps little children hail them father, and 
climb upon their knees. But the world has not 
used them well, they say. Somehow, where 
other men have gotten up, they have gone 
gradually but surely down. A mist has fallen 
On their prospects. They are in a fog, and 
they must stay in it. Things go well with other 
men ; nothing goes well with them. They had 
friends; but their friends now walk, almost 
always, on the other side the street. They had 
chances ; but the gates of fate have been 
shutting up their chances one by one. They 
had a pleasant home; but home is not what it 
used to be. An east wind is blowing through 
the house; frost is nipping the household flowers; 
nothing grows well there ; they like the street or 



MORAL DISINCLINATION. 213 

the club better. Once I tried to climb up a 
steep river bank, the sides of which were formed 
of a loose and comminuted shale. I sunk my 
feet into the soft shale and started. I got up a 
little way. Then it was as if the whole bank 
began to go down with me. I went on, but was 
carried down. As the larger stones became 
dislodged, I had continually to dodge them. It 
was hard, discouraging climbing. So life looks 
to these damaged men. When they try to get 
up a little way, at once they seem to themselves to 
be carried down. " Going to the bad," men say 
of them. Why? Let another tell the reasons: 
" The spell of evil companionship ; the willing- 
ness to hold and use money not honestly gained ; 
the stealthy, seductive, plausible advances of 
the appetite for strong drink ; the treacherous 
fascinations of the gaming table; the gradual 
loss of interest in business and in things which 
help a man up ; the rapid weakening of all 
moral purpose ; the decay of manliness ; the 
recklessness and blasphemy against fate; the 
sullen despair of ever breaking the chains of 



214 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

evil habit." These things, and things like these, 
are in the heads and hearts of these damaged 
men. 

Now, go to them and tell them that, though — 
as in their better moments they will themselves 
confess— they are damaged, there is no need that 
they stay so. Tell them, if they will but go 
forth against these evil Canaanites, if they will 
but break off their sins by righteousness, if they 
will but let themselves be girded by the strength 
of Christ, they may yet win a noble victory — 
pass into a strong, self-respecting, and respect- 
compelling manhood. Tell them that the blood 
of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses the past and is 
energy for the days to come. Urge them, per- 
suade them, promise them your own friendship, 
that you will gladly lay yourself out in any way 
to lift them from the bliglit of damage into the 
clear, sweet consciousness of the right. Too sad, 
often this will be their answer: "Oh, I would, 
but I cannot ; I have tried and failed, and so I 
am sure I cannot." Ask them to say they will, 
and they will ever dodge you, replying : " I will 



MORAL DISINCLINATION. 2l5 

try/' With a real volition they will not go 
forth. They know in their deepest heart, if 
they would, they could, putting up weak, hu- 
man hands that the divine hand may clasp 
their own. Their trouble is the Israelitish 
trouble. It is as modern as it is ancient. 
Their trouble is moral disinclination. Their 
cannot means luill not They do not like al- 
together their damaged plight. There are many 
unpleasant things about it. There must be. 
There must always be. God never can make 
sin blessed. But they do prefer even this state 
of damage, and what belongs to it, to the real, 
regular strain and wrench of will which is the 
first and inexorably needful step of the getting 
out of it. Toward that there is a terrible moral 
disinclination, and so they go on sighing, "I 
cannot," when the tremendous fact about it is 
they will not. 

This moral disinclination — at the heart, will 
not ; on the lip, cannot — is also the commonest 
excuse of merely moral men. It would not be 
right to call them damaged. They are not. 



216 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

They are fair, square, prosperous, reputable 
men. They are honored in society, and they 
should be. Their home is safe beneath the 
benign shadow of their fame. They are clean 
in habit. They are, as the world goes, above 
reproach. 

But a captain in the army once said to Uncle 
John Vassar : 

" I try to do my duty ; I think that is all that 
is required of me." 

"Why, captain, how can you say so?" an- 
swered Uncle John. "No man does his duty 
who does not give his heart to God and live in 
God's service. What \tould you think of a 
man, brought up by a kind father, and pro- 
vided by him with every kind of happiness, who 
should be a good brother and husband and 
neighbor and citizen, and yet be a heartless 
and undutiful son? Do you not see his wick- 
edness would be unspeakably great?" 

"But the cases are different," he replied. 

" No, they are not," said Uncle John ; " that 
man would be condemned by the moral sense of 



MORAL DISINCLINATION. 217 

the community ; and the godless sinner, you may 

depend upon it, will be condemned by the moral 

opinion of the universe." 

It is strange how men will go on in a morality 

which is all right as far as it goes, but which 

can never go far enough, because it stops this 

side of the heart yielded to him who has a right 

to say, "My son, give me thine heart." But 

this moral man, who has heard the gospel 

for many a year, wakes now and then to a 

consciousness that his heart ought to be given. 

But that would involve making a new centre for 

his life. That would apply to it new standards 

— not, What do my neighbors think about 

things? but, What does God think about 

things? That would necessitate wrenching out 

of the groove of comfortable moral habit. So 

this man often says, " I cannot," but means " I 

will not." " I cannot " is the faint excuse. Moral 

disinclination is the genuine hindering cause. 

Let us beware of a cannot which is really will 

not. These Israelites were not the less guilty, 

muttering their false cannots. 
19 



INCREASE. 

TT7RITES Paul to the Thessalonians— *^ I 
* * beseech you, brethren, that ye increase 
more and more." 

So, then, the spiritual life, in the thought of 
Paul, was nothing stationary. It was something 
growing. It was something increasing. And 
Paul's thought was Christ's thought too. In the 
grounds of the palace of Hampton Court, near 
London, there is a wonderful grape vine. It is 
a black Hamburgh vine. It is more than a 
hundred years old. Nor for all that time has it 
ceased growing, and burdening itself yearly with 
numerous clusters. The year I saw it, that 
single vine had twelve hundred and fifty chisters 
hanging from its branches. Under its shade, 
and looking up at this wealth of fruitage, the 
words of the Lord Jesus came to me with 

strange significance: "Herein is my Father 
(218) 



INCREASE. 219 

glorified, that ye bear much fruit. So shall ye 
be my disciples." Life, fruitage, going on to 
fruitage, increase, this was the thought of our 
Lord Jesus, for the spiritual life, as well as the 
thought of Paul. Decrease — that is not the 
word for the spiritual life. Standing still, 
merely holding one's own — that is not the word 
for it. Increase — that is the word for it. 

Now I imagine that on this point of increasing 
more and more, the experience of many Chris- 
tians is especially dim and misty, and unsatis- 
factory. They have a very much more conscious 
and definite experience of the beginning of the 
spiritual life, than they have of its advance. 
The beginning was something definite. The 
subsequent advance is too much indefinite. They 
have an uncomfortable, vague, straining feeling 
that they ought to get on ; but they cannot feel 
much that they are getting on. Indeed, the 
faces of many are turned backward toward the 
vigor and brilliance of a first love, not forward 
toward the stronger strength and nobler shining 
of a better and a deeper love. Indeed, many are 



220 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

conscious of a certain real inward deterioration. 
They know their prayers are less prayerful, their 
consciences less quick, their spiritual purposes 
less stringent and less girded, their soul life in a 
state of sleep and winter, rather than in a state 
of growth and fruit-bearing and summer. And 
some who will not confess themselves in such a 
state of spiritual decadence are nevertheless 
really in it. The prophet Hosea had a length- 
ened ministry. He had fallen on sad times. 
Evil of every sort Avas rampant in the land. 
Plot, and treachery, and conspiracy dethroned 
king after king, and the wickedness of the rulers 
-was but the bloom of the wickedness striking 
through the people. All the signs pointed, not 
toward national advance, but toward national 
extinction. And yet the people were all uncon- 
scious of their decaying state ; and that was the 
saddest feature — that they were unconscious of 
it. What could save them if they would not be 
waked up to save themselves ? So this is Hosea's 
sad description of them : " Gray hairs are here 
and there upon him, yet he knoweth not.'' The 



INCREASE. 221 

deterioration is all the time going on, and yet 
Israel is ignorant of it. That is true of many 
a church and many a soul to-day — not increas- 
ing more and more, but unconscious spiritual 
deterioration. 

So, then, what I propose to do just now is to 
look at our Scripture by way of contrast ; not to 
urge the duty of spiritual increase — there Avere no 
need of that, that is confessed already; but to 
seek to point out, if I may, some of the causes 
which prevent a spiritual advance. 

Roughly, man is analyzed into three great 
energies. He is a being possessing thought, affec- 
tion, will. For the sake of clearness, let us use 
this large and real analysis. 

Let us think of some of the causes preventing 
spiritual increase in the realm of the thought, in 
the realm of the affection, in the realm of the 
will. 

In the realm of the thought, a common cause 

preventing increase in the spiritual life is, the 

failure to thoughtfully discriminate, under the 

light of the teachings of the Master, between 
19* 



222 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

really right feeling and action and their counter- 
feits. Let me illustrate my meaning : The Duke 
of Argyle tells us " that there are many species 
of the genus mantis which are wholly modeled in 
the form of vegetable growths. The legs are made 
to imitate leaf-stalks, the body is elongated and 
notched so as to simulate a twig, the segment of the 
shoulders is spread out and flattened in the like- 
ness of a seed-vessel, and the large wings are 
exact imitations of a full-blown leaf, with all its 
veins and skeleton complete, and all its color and 
apparent texture. There is something startling 
and almost terrible in the completeness of the 
deception — very terrible it must be to its hopeless 
victims. It is the habit of these creatures to sit 
upon the leaves which they so closely resemble, 
apparently motionless, but really advancing on 
their prey with a slow and insensible approach. 
Their resemblance disarms suspicion." So, as 
another has suggested, there are counterfeits in 
Christian deed and feeling. Decision is a Chris- 
tian grace, but how easily it passes over into its 
counterfeit — a harsh and evil overbearingness. 



INCREASE. 223 

Earnestness is a Christian grace, but how easily 
it passes over into its counterfeit — an unholy and, 
perhaps, even petulant impatience. Confidence is 
a Christian grace. It is both right and possible 
for the Christian to say I know whom I have be- 
lieved, but how easily it passes over into its coun- 
terfeit — a vainglorious spiritual pride. Gentle- 
ness is a Christian grace, but how easily it passes 
over into its counterfeit — a poor and helpless 
weakness, which has no backbone about anything. 
Contentment is a Christian grace, but how easily 
it may pass over into its counterfeit — a stupid and 
sluggish indifference. Caution is a Christian 
grace, but how easily it may pass over into its 
counterfeit — a limp timidity. Boldness is a 
Christian grace, but how quickly may it get into 
its counterfeit— a careless rashness. There is 
room and reason for thoughtful, self-examining, 
prayerful discrimination here. It is so easy for 
the decided man to be overbearing, or the quieter 
man to be weak, or the earnest man to be impa- 
tient, or the bold man to be rash — and the failure 
to make such discrimination, you can easily see, 



224 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

is a failure to illustrate at once the sweetness and 
the power, the winningness and the stalwartness 
of the Christian life. The failure of our loyal 
reception into our thought of Christ's doctrines, 
and the failure of thoughtful and prayerful ap- 
plication of those doctrines to our own feelings 
and actions, are common causes, in this realm of 
the thought, which prevent increase in the spirit- 
ual life. 

But notice a few of the causes preventing in- 
crease in the spiritual life in the realm of the affec- 
tions. Now, in this realm, a great hindering 
cause is a leaving of the first love. The Church 
in Ephesus had many things which even Christ 
could praise : it had good works, it had activity, 
it had patience, it had protest against evil, it had 
doctrinal fidelity, it had unfainting energy; and 
yet it was failing and blameable, because it had 
not kept first that which was first — a supreme 
love to him who w'alketh amid the golden candle- 
sticks. How could it help failing, failing here. 
What Coleridge says of love in the lower sense, 
is true even in the spiritual and higher ; 



INCREASE. 225 

All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 

Are but the ministers of love, 
And feed its sacred flame. 

If that flame fail, all these fail too. 

" For, what is temperance," says an old writer, 
" but love which no pleasure seduceth ; what is 
prudence, but love which no error enticeth ; what 
is fortitude, but love which endureth adverse 
things with courage ; what is justice, but love 
which composeth by a certain charm the inequal- 
ities of this life." But, if love go down, these go 
down with it, just as when the heart fails, life 
fails in brain and eye and limb. So there can 
be no such thing as increase in the spiritual life, 
if that love which should be first, be not kept 
first. 

If a religious indifference be allowed to strike 
its chill over that fire, spiritual life must decline. 
As another says : " The Scythians used to strike 
the cords of their bows at their feasts, to remind 
themselves of danger. If we are intent against 
heaviness, it will flee away." 



226 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

If a stupid desire for religious ease stop the 
draught for the flame of love, the spiritual life 
must flicker. If a contaminating, secular, and 
worldly spirit poison the air on which that love 
feeds, there can be neither health nor glow in the 
religious life. 

And if some other love — the sad love for some 
sad sin — take the place of that supreme love on 
the heart's altar, how can love of sin, forcing out 
the pure love and the foremost, minister anything 
but damage and decay to the spiritual life ? 

Said one, amid the wilds of Australia, who had 
loved purely, and the fires of which love he would 
not let die out : " I was kept from many a sad sin 
simply by this thought: *for her sake.'" And 
no Christian can possibly increase in the spiritual 
life who, amid life's duties and self conflict and 
stringencies, is not gladly conscious of the moving 
of this overmastering motive in him, for Christ's 
sake. 

Guard your love, if you would grow in grace. 
Let your soul get warmth from no alien flame, 
and refuse to have to do with anything which 



INCREASE. 227 

^vill not to the love of Christ bring fuel. Keep 
thine heart with all diligence, for out of it are 
the issues of life. 

But notice, also, wnat cause there may be in 
the realm of the willy preventing increase in the 
spiritual life. 

Mary Anne Clough was a factory girl in 
Glasgow. She worked with her own hands for 
her daily bread. She sped to the factory in the 
cold, dark mornings, long before half the world 
was up. She wrought on through the long 
hours, until the waning day had brought again 
the darkness. The Scotch factory children, in 
their ignorance and vice and squalor, began to 
trouble her as she mingled with them. She 
became full of a woman's and of a Christian's 
pity for them. She said, I will try if I can win 
them to God, and to doing what is good. Now, 
of course, it was a very right and gracious thing 
for Mary Clough to have such feelings. But 
do you not see that the feeling simply would 
neither have lifted her nor lifted them ? There is 
even a certain selfish pleasure in tender and 



228 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

loving feeling simply. How many cry over 
novels, and yet are no better for their crying. 

But Mary Clough did not stop at feeling ; she 
turned her will into a channel for her feeling, 
and set her feeling flowing through her will and 
out to something. She got an empty room in 
the basement of the factory. On the Sundays 
and in the evenings of the toiling days, she 
gathered the factory children in it. She taught 
them, cleaned them, lifted them, loved them. 
Pretty soon there began to be sweet, clean, pure- 
minded children about the factories. Mary 
Anne's boys they were, the people said. Out of 
that small seed has grown, and is growing to- 
day, a mighty and permanent Christian charity, 
the Glasgow Foundry Boys' Religious Society. 
Now, do you not see how great a Christian was 
Mary Clough, and do you not see that she was 
lifted into such Christ-hood because she did not 
let feeling wait at the place of will, but through 
will took up that Christian feeling and carried it 
out and into Christian action ? 

Here, then, is a too common preventing cause 



INCREASE. 229 

of increasing religious life. We are not enough 
like Mary Anne Clough. We too frequently 
baffle right feeling by bad and sluggish Avill, and 
so we Avaste it and soon kill it. 

It is right feeling flowing out through right 
will into right action that ministers to grace, and 
makes strong and fruitful the spiritual life. 

We do not need so much to feel more, as to 
transmute what we already feel into holy action 
by a holy will. 

This is what Christians ought to be — like 
pictures showing deeper tints and lovelier color- 
ings as the days go by — improving as they get 
older; like violins — scattering sweeter music the 
more the bow is drawn across them, singing in 
richer tones the harder they are put at service. 



20 



"THE SUNDAYS OF MAN'S LIFE." 

TN one of the English coal mines, there is Avhat 
-^ the miners call a Sunday stone. Water 
charged with lime is trickling through the rocks, 
and, as it falls, is making constant deposits of 
pure white limestone. But when the miners are 
at work, and are scattering the coal-dust all about, 
the water becomes charged with coal as well as 
lime, and the stone, which otherwise were white, 
takes upon itself the black coal hue. 

But when the Sunday comes, and the men cease 
working, and the whirring coal-dust settles, then 
upon the blackness of the deposit of the day be- 
fore begins to drop the clean lime water, leaving, 
as it trickles off, the pure white stone. And so, 
by the regularly recurring line of whiteness, 
record is made of the coming to the tired miners 
of God's day of rest. 

Into your tired lives comes, as well, the Sunday 
(230) 



THE SUNDAYS OF MAN's LIFE. 231 

whiteness. I know that some of you choose to 

stain it with the earthly dust you will not let lie 

quiet on God's Day. But that is your fault, not 

God's. Once a week, he gives you this white, 

protected day. 

And when you count up what George Herbert 

sings of, as 

The Sundays of man's life, 
Thredded together on Time's string, 

their amount is startling, if you will reckon it by 
your arithmetic. The young man who has reached 
the age of twenty years, has received from the 
hand of God nearly three solid years of Sundays. 
He who has reached the age of forty years, has 
received from the hand of God nearly six solid 
years of Sundays. The man who has reached 
the age of sixty years, has received from the 
hand of God nearly nine solid years of Sundays. 
Can it be true that we have no time to seek God 
in? 

They mean much — these Sundays. The tem- 
pest of toil is hushed beneath tlieir " Peace, be 
still ! " The strain of life loosens itself a little. 



232 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Not for them, the hurry of the street and the 
scramble of the market. Not needfully, for the 
Lord's Day, the anchoring the thought to the 
humdrum tasks. As when ships, safe from the 
swellings and the buffetings of the ocean, ride 
quietly in some fair harbor, so on the restful 
Lord's Day may your soul find mooring. This 
is the day for higher and other thinkings. This 
is the day when the soul may close the windows 
which look out toward the earth, and open those 
which front toward heaven. This is the day for 
spiritual stimulation. 

These "Sundays of man's life, Thredded to- 
gether on Time's string" — these years of them, 
what have we done, what are we doing unto them 
all? A solemn question this. 



SUCCESS. 

I HAVE thought much of these words as 
affording a divine suggestion concerning 
success in life. They are the words Paul wrote 
to the Galatians. " But when it pleased God, 
who separated me from my mother's womb, and 
called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me, 
that I might preach him among the heathen, 
immediately I conferred not with flesh and 
blood." 

Here is Paul's statement of his divine devote- 
ment to his duty ; of the divine empowering for 
his duty; of his subsequent way of doing his 
duty. 

The devotement was from the bednnino; — 
God separated him to his great office and func- 
tion, from his mother's womb; that he should 
carry on his apostleship was the divine meaning 

of his appearance in the world. 
20^ (233) 



234 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

I am sure we are to understand that this 
devotement took into itself all influences of 
heredity, of external circumstances, of various 
and peculiar education. It was because Paul 
had such a mother and such a father — Hebrews 
of the Hebrews, and yet dowered with the great 
dignity of Roman citizenship; it was because he 
was born, not in the narrow ritualistically con- 
fining air of Palestine, but in the freer air of 
Tarsus in Cilicia, and where Jews would not so 
much think Gentiles pitiable dogs ; it was 
because he had the ampler education of such a 
Gentile city, but, also, in his impressionable boy- 
hood was brought up at Jerusalem, according to 
the straitest sect of his religion, a Pharisee, at 
the feet of Gamaliel, — that he could be at once so 
thoroughly a Jew, and, at the same time, stand 
in welcoming attitude toward the Gentile ; that 
he could preach Christ so triumphantly among 
the Gentiles, commending to them a Messiah 
who, though he was Saviour of all the world, was 
yet a Jew. 

Except Paul had been thus divinely separated 



SUCCESS. 235 

from his mother's womb, and had been surrounded 
with such circumstances, and had been touched 
by so much and such various culture, he could 
not have wrought in and wrought through such 
an apostleship. God's hand was in it all. 

The divine empowering for his duty was the 
revelation within himself of the personal Christ, 
" w^ho called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in 
me/' 

It was because Paul knew Christ as his own 
personal Saviour, so intimately and so thoroughly, 
that he could preach him so enthusiastically and 
so conqueringly. Paul spoke out of an inward 
conviction ; he knew w^hereof he affirmed, for he 
had felt it all, and mightily, in his own soul. 

Paul's way of doing his duty was the way of 
simple personal loyalty to Christ : " Immediately 
I conferred not with flesh and blood." 

The question was not what others thought, not 
what others said, but what, as far as he could find 
it out, the Lord Jesus would have him do. 

The standard was not custom, not tradition, 
not example of other people, of other apostles, 



236 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

even ; but the word of Christ as it had shone 
gloriously on him. 

The divine separation to it, and the divinely 
arranged culture for it ; the presence of the per- 
sonal Christ in his personal soul ; unwavering 
and inextinguishable personal loyalty to that 
Christ — these were tlie three vital roots of that 
magnificent apostleship. 

I suppose that in the proportion in which these 
three roots are vital in any life, is that life gen- 
uinely successful. 

When a man believes that God has given him 
something definitely to do in this world — what- 
ever it be, whether merchandising, banking, farm- 
ing, building, bricklaying, school teaching, plead- 
ing, healing, preaching ; when a man receives 
into himself the high inspiration of religion for 
the doing of that thing ; when a man holds him- 
self in burning and pulsating loyalty primarily 
to the Great Task-master — then, I suppose, that 
man is likeliest to achieve at least what God will 
crown as a genuine success. 



THE INNER SPRING. 

rriHERE is a wonderful truth, veiled and yet 
-*- evident, in the fourth verse of the Forty- 
sixth Psalm : " There is a river, the streams 
whereof shall make glad the City of God, the 
Holy Place of the tabernacles of the Most 
High.'* The Psalm is a burst of praise for 
the sudden and surprising deliverance from the 
beleao^urino; Sennacherib. 

It was a very marked peculiarity of Jerusa- 
lem, it was a feature singular to it among the 
then cities of the world. Jerusalem was an 
altogether inland city. It Avas perched upon its 
hills amid surrounding mountains. It laved its 
feet in no broad river. It had no harbor looking 
outward on the sea. And yet no city was sup- 
plied with water as Jerusalem was, within itself. 
For there was within Jerusalem a living spring 

beneath the Temple vaults. It was this spring 
(237) 



238 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

whence the water welled to fill the two Siloam 
pools. It was of this perennial spring, within 
Jerusalem, whence came the streams that made 
glad God's city, of which the Psalmist sings. 
*^A11 my springs are in thee/' bursts forth 
another Psalm. *^ Draw water out of the wells 
of salvation," exclaims Isaiah, referring to this 
unwastinoj internal fountain. It was the fio^ure 
borrowed from this spring which Jesus used, 
when, there in the Temple, during the Feast 
of Tabernacles, he stood forth and cried : *' If 
any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink ; 
he that believeth on me, as the Scripture saith, 
out of him shall flow rivers of living water ; but 
this spake he of the Spirit, which they that be- 
lieve on him should receive." 

So you see how^ strong and wonderful the figure 
really is. Sennacherib might come forth with 
countless armies, and bid them encamp about 
Jerusalem as locusts do, in thickening swarms. 
He might do many things. But there was one 
thing he could not do. He could not cut off 
Jerusalem from this internal and plentiful supply 



THE INNER SPRING. 239 

of clear, sweet water. The fountains of that were 
within herself. So far forth she could never 
be the slave of hostile circumstances; she was 
always the mistress of them. 

Now% this will be the peculiar gift of God to 
us, if w^e will have it so — this of the inner spring. 
Even as Jesus said, speaking of the Holy Spirit, 
" He that believeth on me, out of him shall flow 
rivers of living w^ater." God will thus be in a 
man, internal supply and strength ; making him 
the sovereign of difficult circumstances, and not 
the thrall of them; making him possessed of 
something within himself which nothing outward 
can reach or drain away, even as Jerusalem, with 
this living spring welling up abundantly within 
herself, could not be forced to thirst even by the 
mighty armies of Sennacherib. Here is abundant 
supply of internal invigoration ; for, as the Psalm 
says, this inward spring wells up, not into a stream 
simply, but into streams. Here is the fountain 
of the deepest and most unwasting joy ; for, as 
the Psalm sings again, these streams make glad 
the city of God ; and, after all, what gladness is 



240 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

comparable with the consciousness that God is, 
like the spring within Jerusalem, at the centre of 
one^s life, feeding and filling one with an inde- 
pendent and unconquerable energy ? 

That is a poor life which has no resource in 
itself. It is the privilege of the Christian to have 
resource in himself. The Book of Acts is the 
record of the shaking of the world by the early 
Christians. With circumstances all against them, 
they, notwithstanding, shook the world. They 
shook the world, because they were conscious of 
an internal power. They were conscious of an 
internal power, because God dwelt in them by the 
Holy Spirit. It is a most significant fact that, in 
the Book of Acts, which is the record of power, 
the Holy Spirit is mentioned oftener than in any 
other book of Scripture; is mentioned no less 
than seventy-one separate times. It was because 
they had this river, the streams whereof make 
glad the city of God, so consciously within them- 
selves, that those early Christians became, not 
poor and passive recipients of outward influences, 
but batteries of holy force. 



THE INNER SPRING. 241 

How splendidly independent of outward cir- 
cumstances this having God within one, by the 
indwelling of the Holy Spirit, can make a man. 

As I have been reading lately, there was Cicero, 
exiled, but exiled with every mitigation ; not im- 
prisoned, simply exiled ; he could live where and 
how he pleased; sumptuous house; troops of 
friends; luxurious table; abundant wealth — but, 
though he was philosopher and orator, filling his 
letters from his exile with unmanly whining. 
His life was rooted too much in circumstances, 
and when these failed, he failed. 

Seneca, exiled ; full of profession of a grand 
and stoical sovereignty over pain and passion ; 
with the whole range of the island of Sardinia ; 
with immense wealth ; vast reputation ; powerful 
in friends ; but so struck down and subdued by 
his short exile that, like a whipped cur, he grov- 
eled at the feet of the worst of men, that his 
exile might cease. His life was rooted too much 
in circumstances, and when these failed, he failed. 

But read the Epistle to the Philippians. It 

was written from a prison worse than exile. It 
21 



242 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

was written where chains clanked, and poverty 
intruded, and death threatened. But peace reigns 
in it, and Psalms sing in it, and an unwasting joy 
shines in it. As a great commentator says of it : 
"The whole letter bears the impress, at times 
almost elegiac, of resignation in view of death ; 
with high, apostolic dignity, unbroken holy joy, 
hope, and victory over the world." The apostle 
here, in his Roman imprisonment, as another so 
well says, " recalls to our mind the runner who, 
at the supreme moment of Grecian history, 
brought to Athens the news of Marathon. Worn, 
panting, exhausted with the effort to be the her- 
ald of deliverance, he sank in death on the 
threshold of the first house which he reached 
with the tidings of victory, and sighed forth his 
gallant soul in one great sob, almost in the very 
same words as those used by the apostle, ^x^ipsTs 
^aipofieu — Rejoice ye, we too rejoice.' '' What 
was death to the runner, with such a joy as the 
victory of Marathon welling in his heart ? What 
was the worst imprisonment to Paul, with the joy 
of the conscious indwelling of the God of power 



THE INNER SPRING. 243 

and the God of promise, by the Holy Spirit fur- 
nishing him with inward and holy and conquer- 
ing vigor, whatever might betide ? 

Ah! this is the privilege of the Christian. 
There are for him internal springs. And how, 
amid the numerous and mighty Sennaeheribs of 
various sorrows and evils crowding round our 
souls, do we need this divine indwelling, which 
shall be to us an internal fountain of invigoration, 
as was that internal river, the streams whereof 
made glad the city of God to the sorely belea- 
guered, but, because of this internal upwelling 
spring, still resistant and still triumphant Jeru- 
salem. 



GOD'S METHOD. 

rpHIS has always seemed to me a luminous 
-■■• illustration of the divine triumph over evil 
in us and for us, — "And the God of peace shall 
bruise Satan under your feet shortly.'' In his 
autobiography, Dr. Lyman Beecher tells us that 
when he was pastor at East Hampton, there were 
a few Indians of the Montauk tribe connected 
with his parish. There was a pious squaw who 
used to come up when they were killing things 
before Thanksgiving, and gather scraps from the 
portions which W'Cre throw^n away. She was 
picking round Colonel Gardner's barn. 

" Come here, Betty," says Colonel Gardner — 
and packed her basket full of good solid meat, 
and handed it to her. 

She looked up in silent astonishment. She 
could not believe her eyes. At last she lifted up 
her hands and said : 

(244) 



god's method. 245 

" Thank the Lord for giving me this meat. 
Thank you, too, Colonel Gardner/' 

The poor old Indian woman put it truly. God 
helped her, but he helped her through the Col- 
onel. God wrought for her, but through second 
causes. 

It is thus that God works for us and in us. 
God shall bruise Satan ; but under our own feet 
We are not merely passive recipients of the 
victory that God achieves. There must be in 
us the strong arm and the persistent battle. 
Out of temptations resisted, out of triumphs 
Avon, out of constant spurnings of the wrong, 
gradually rises and towers the stately character. 

I count this thing to be grandly true, 
That a noble deed is a step toward God, 
Lifting the soul from the common sod 

To a purer air and a broader view. 

We rise by things that are under our feet, 
By what we have mastered of good and gain. 
By the pride deposed and the passion slain, 

And the vanquished ills that we hourly meet. 

Heaven is not reached at a single bound ; 

But we build the ladder by which we rise 

Erom the lowly earth to the vaulted skies; 

And we mount to its summit round by round. 
21^ 



246 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

Yet it is God who works for us, and in us, and 
yet still by us. We could gain no victory but in 
his strength. He must bruise Satan. Satan is 
too mighty for our feeble feet. But we can, by 
inward consecration, make alliance with the 
mighty One, and so find even Satan weak and 
bruised beneath our heel. 



GRIEVING THE SPIRIT. 

OENECA has left the world, and yet Seneca 
'^ lives in it — a real force and influence, 
through the truth and beauty of many of the 
moral precepts he enunciated, universal to all 
men and all time. 

Charlemagne has left the world, and yet he 
lives in it — a real force and influence, through the 
civilization w^hich sprang out of his compelling 
that incoherent Europe into the organism of a 
single empire. 

Newton has left the world, and yet he lives in it 
— a real force and influence, through the impulse 
he gave to science, by that grand generalization 
in w^hich he rose to the conception of the all- 
including law of gravitation. 

Milton has left the world, and yet he lives in 

it — a real force and influence, through the high 
(247) 



248 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

argument of that mighty poem, in which he 
sought to justify the ways of God to men. 

And so multitudes of others — orators, poets, 
statesmen, philanthropists, artists, whose names 
men will not willingly let die — have left the 
world, and yet are in it still, pervasive and 
present forces, through the stirring words they 
spoke, the noble songs they sang, the civilizations 
they inaugurated, the beneficence they planned, 
the pictures they painted. 

So, too, Christ has left the world — not by 
death, as these have, but by glorious resurrection 
and ascension- — and he too yet lives in the w^orld. 
But how? Only as these live in it? Only 
in the way of the natural effects of his great 
historical appearance ? 

No! In a way as different from that in which 
all these abide among us, as is the actual presence 
of your friend from the poor memory of that 
friend after death has summoned you to the long 
farewell from him. How, then, does Christ still 
live among us ? Let a story tell us. 

Many years ago, a poor slave woman, who 



GRIEVING THE SPIRIT. 249 

could not read a line, who had struggled and 
wrestled toward God, darkened and oppressed 
with the agony of a great seeking, had revealed 
to her a vision of Jesus. It was to her a strange, 
new, wonderful revelation. She saw one stand- 
ing between God and man, one who loved, and 
one who loved her. She felt that he loved her, 
and this knowledge poured a flood of light and 
joy into her heart. She said : 

*^I felt such a rush of love ; I loved every- 
thing. I said, * Yes, Lord, I ken love even the 
w^hite folks/ But," she said, "I thought to 
myself, ef the white folks knows I've got Jesus, 
they'll get him away, somehow ; and so I kep' it 
all to myself, and thought I wouldn't tell no- 
body. But," she continued, " I went to a Metho- 
dist class-meeting, and they began to get up and 
'late their experiences. Well, the first one that 
spoke began to tell about Jesus. * Why,' says I, 
'that one has got him too.' And then another 
got up, and says I, ' He has got him too.' And 
finally says I, * They's all got him.' " 

This experience of the devout negro, and of 



250 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

those to whom her heart could not help respond- 
ing as she heard them speak of the Lord Jesus, 
is an experience peculiar and true of Christ only. 
It is possible to speak of knowing Christ by some 
spiritual intuition, of seeing Christ, of feeling 
Christ. Thus, divinely, intimately, really, not 
vaguely and remotely in the w^ay of a general 
historic influence, but in veritable and personal 
presence — does Christ live in the world, in the 
hearts of those who love him. They have him. 

But now, since Christ, in bodily presence, has 
ascended to the right hand of the Father, it is 
by the ministry of the Holy Spirit that he is 
thus present in the hearts of the believers. 

The Hcly Spirit dwelling in a man, is the 
divine Christ personally present in him. 

But Christ is thus personally present in us 
only as we distinctly choose to have him thus. 
*^ The kingdom of God is within you." If we 
would have this kingdom of God within us, God 
our Lord Jesus dwelling in us thus, the Holy 
Spirit must be King. Everything must obey 
him. He must be absolute ruler. Hence the 



GRIEVING THE SPIRIT. 251 

reason for the admonition of the Scripture that 
we "resist not/' "limit not/' "grieve not/' 
"provoke not/' "vex not/' "quench not/' the 
Holy Spirit. For what is doing any one of 
these things ? It is choosing against Christ, and 
so dethroning Christ from our inner hearts. 



THE FADING LEAF. 

T SOMETIMES think that God has set the 

-■- yearly time of decay amid such gorgeous- 

ness, that, while we may not fail to learn the sad 

and somber lessons, we may be enticed into 

deeper study, to reach the more hidden, but 

brighter and more hopeful truths, which it is 

given to the fading leaves to teach. 

Here is a lesson the fading leaf may teach on 

its brighter side : That since we must fade, ive 

ought not to fade before our time. While the 

leaf fades, it has its time for fading. It does not 

fade before its time. A sudden w^hirlwind may 

tear it off, but then it falls green, not faded. 

Sudden and early death may strike us too ; but 

then we should die really young, not old and 

faded and worn-out, though young in years. 

Every leaf has its time to fade. Henry D. 

Thoreau — that man who lived a recluse life so 
(S52) 



THE FADING LEAF. 253 

many years in a hut, by the side of that small 
inland lake near Concord, and who had one of 
the keenest and most patient eyes that were 
ever opened upon nature — could tell to the very 
day, and almost to the very moment, w^hen the 
leaves of the forest trees around him, oak, maple, 
chestnut, would begin to change and fade. 
While we do fade like the leaves, like them also 
we are not to fade before our time. 

There is many a fresh young life eaten up 
and shriveled by some blight, long before its 
legitimate fading time. We call it a dispensa- 
tion of Providence. I fear me, it is oftener 
really a dispensation of unwise parents, or of 
thick-headed and cold-hearted schoolmasters, or 
of ungoverned and passionate self-will, or of a 
wearing and wasting toil, or of thin dresses 
and thin shoes, amid the wintry air of some 
fashionable season. 

'Why! I have stood upon the street and seen 

the children coming home from school, too often 

wearing pale and weary faces, with laggard gait, 

with feverish appearance, going home to what ? 
22 



254 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

— to play and rest, as they have a right, with 
never a thought more of books till the school- 
bell shall ring next morning ? No ; out of long 
hours of study at school, going into long hours 
of study at home — five and six lessons to learn a 
day (no child ought to learn more than three at 
the utmost). And then everybody, parents, 
teachers, friends, praising them for precocity; 
parents proud of the fact that their children will 
graduate so young ; and the children robbed of 
their life, fading like the leaf in early summer, 
bitten by the worm or smitten by the blight. 

So I have seen young men old men, and young 
women old women, because stimulants and dissi- 
pation of various sorts had been eating at them. 

So, too, the blight of hard and unceasing toil 
causes many a fair young life to fade before its 
time. We cannot stand the strain of a constant 
toil, if it be real and honest. It is like keeping 
a leaf in the glare of the sun all the time, with 
no night to wrap it axound with its dampnefc^i 
and its rest. Every toilful life must freshen 
itself; must fight off" fading by rest. 



THE FADING LEAF. 255 

I met some time ago an article from one of the 
world's most helpful living teachers, none the less 
so because she is a woman. It told how, in the 
old times, when children were more strictly ruled, 
Saturday afternoon was the children's perquisite. 
Then they did what they pleased ; at other times, 
they did as they were bid. And so this writer 
tells us, every one should have a Saturday after- 
noon ; when toil shall no more command, but 
rather, pleasure delightfully allow. No life can 
help fading without such a rest, any more than a 
leaf can keep green without rain. It makes 
little difference what that restful pleasure be, so 
long as it be right and restful, and a pleasure. 

I remember how once, when I was in Nan- 
tucket, I went to see a cabinet of all sorts of 
incongruous curiosities, which one of the inhabit- 
ants of that quaint place was fond of showing. 
It had been picked up in all quarters of the 
world, by her husband, who had been a sailor. 
Almost everything was in it ; but everything was 
carefully kept, and upon everything was hung a 
story — and such a bright, fresh, cheery, young 



256 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE 

old woman to show it, and to talk about it, as you 
rarely see. That cabinet had been her Saturday 
afternoon. It had been full of restful interest to 
her; it had held her in her affection for her 
husband, these things which he brought home. 
It had kept her young and fresh ; it had fought 
off fading, and largely conquered it. She was 
fading as the leaf fades, gloriously in its time. 
Since we must fade, let us do it as the leaf does, 
and as God would have us, in the time of fading, 
not before. Let us use life as if it were a gift 
from God ; not as abusing it, but as preserving 
it; then our decline shall be like the sun set- 
ting, companioned with radiant clouds, or like 
the autumn leaf, fading, but brighter in the colors 
of its decease than in the colors of its prime. 

Here, too, I think, is another lesson on this 
brighter side from the fading leaves. Leaves fade 
and fall, but only when their ivork is done : and 
their work remains. Here is a stalk or branch 
with the young leaves of the early spring just 
budded out upon it. Wait till the autumn 
comes, and look at that branch again. The 



THE FADING LEAF. * 257 

leaves are now fading on it, and falling from it, 
but, there is piled upon its end a whole season's 
longer growth, and everywhere it is thicker through. 
Why ? Because each leaf upon that branch, all 
the season long has been paying a small tax to 
that branch for its sustaining. Each leaf, from 
the moment of its majority, collects for that 
branch a certain quantity of wood, or what will 
become wood, and sends it down the stalk, to add 
to its length and thickness ; down the stalk ; 
down further still, to the branch; to the tree- 
stem ; to the most distant rootlet mining in the 
darkness. So is the whole tree stronger and 
larger for a single leaf. It is very little that the 
leaf does. It is only a slender filament of woody 
fiber, which the leaf sends down : but it has not 
failed ; it has done its little well and wisely. Its 
work remains. Let it fade and fall, now that its 
work is done. Its death, that is only the signal 
of accomplishment and victory. So are the 
mighty forests builded by the patient, plodding 
working of the fading and the falling leaves. 

Nothing but leaves have built the forests up. 
22* 



258 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

You may be fading, O my brother. You see 
with a dimmer sight ; you step with a less elastic 
tread ; you remember with a feebler grasp ; you 
think with a slower brain. Well, these are only 
prophecies of victory, if your work has been 
bravely going on. Now the long struggle of the 
battle is drawing towards its end. Now the 
glory of the triumph begins to shine. It is into 
the lap of the fading autumn that is emptied the 
gathered richness of the year. The tasks of life 
are almost done. The leaf may fade and fall, 
but the work remains. The great Tree of Hu- 
manity is being lifted by the working of all these 
fading and falling leaves of men and women, 
clinging for a little to its branches. Says John 
Ruskin : " If ever in autumn, a pensiveness falls 
upon us, as the leaves drift by us in their fading, 
may we not wisely look up in hope to their 
mighty monuments? Behold how fair, how far, 
prolonged in arch and aisle the avenues of the 
valleys, the fringes of the hills ! So stately, so 
eternal! The joy of man, the comfort of all 
living creatures, the glory of the earth, they are 



THE FADING LEAF. 259 

but the monuments of those poor leaves that flit 
faintly past us to die. Let them not pass except 
we understand their last counsel and example, 
that we also, careless of a monument by the grave, 
may build it in the world — a monument by which 
men may be taught to remember, not where we 
died, but where we lived." 

Leaves fade and fall ; but that is not the end 
of it. The winter comes with its wind to whirl 
them afar, and with its snows to bury them ; 
but that is not the end of it. The faded fallen 
leaf is buried ; but it is not lost. The leaf is 
scattered into soil at the tree's base ; but it is not 
lost. Death is the slave of life. Life strikes its 
roots downward into death. That very fallen 
leaf transmuted into nutriment for the tree, shall 
be lifted up its trunk again, and be flung out a 
fresh banner from its topmost bough. Leaves 
fade and fall into death, but also, through death, 
into another life. 

Oh, friends, a human fading may be but the 
beginning of the birth-process into the infinitely 
rich and restful life of heaven. 



CHRIST AND THE GRAVE. 

rriHERE is a sad, suggestive monument in 

^ Mount Auburn Cemetery, near Boston. 

There is a statue of a dog lying on its master's 

grave. The story of the statue is — that the 

master died ; that the dog followed the dead 

body to the grave; that when the gravel had 

fallen upon the coffin in the grave, the dog lay 

down upon it; that nothing could induce the 

pitiful, loving creature to leave the spot; that 

what little food it ate of what was plentifully 

brought to it, it ate there upon that grave ; that 

it hopelessly pined away ; that soon it died ; that 

then they dug a grave beside its master's for the 

faithful creature, and commemorated its devotion, 

as was fitting, by this statue. It is a sad statue, 

because it tells of such a dumb, hopeless sorrow. 

That was all the dog could know — that its master 

had been put there, under the ground. That was 
(260) 



CHRIST AND THE GRAVE. 261 

all the dog could do, to show its poor, pitiful, 
longing love — stay there, in a determined tender- 
ness, until it died. You could not make the dog 
know anything more than that, anything higher. 
You could not tell the dog of any final certainty 
of immortality for the master he loved in such a 
dumb, devoted way. You could not make him 
understand the thought of heaven, and glorified 
being, and infinitely better life and destiny into 
which it was possible that master passed. All 
the dog could know was that they had put his 
master down there, under the ground, and that 
was the end of everything for the poor creature. 
It is a sad statue, because it is one that tells of 
sad, hopeless, unillumined, utterly disastrous sor- 
row falling down upon that to the last clinging 
and almost human affection. 

The statue is significant, for it is to just such 
darkened, despairing sorrow that much of the 
modern thinking would lead us. For that, there 
is nothino; that tells of certain and sufficient liojht 
beyond death. Kobert Ingersoll, with breaking 
heart and manly tears, seeking to say something 



262 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

over the coffin of his dead brother, can say 
scarcely more than this dog could have said, had 
he been gifted with the ability of speech. For 
him, there is no certainty, no sunrise; at best, 
but the vanishing flutter of the faintest hope. 
The pagan thought of death was only that of 
this poor, dumb dog, lying here on his master's 
grave. "She who lies here, coveted not, while 
alive, garments of gold, but desired discretion 
and virtue ; but now, Dionysia, in place of youth 
and bloom, the fates have awarded thee this 
sepulchre.'' So reads a recently disinterred 
Athenian burial inscription. It is the sorrow 
of the poor, dumb creature. There is the sepul- 
chre — that is all there is. Take your modern 
thinking which declares itself to be the rational 
and scientific; what does it bring men to but just 
the hopeless sorrow of this despairing animal? 
There was John Stuart Mill. If ever a man 
loved his wife, he did his. If ever a woman 
loved her husband, sympathizing with him in 
his work, sharing with him in his studies, refusing 
to let him go alone, but keeping pace with him 



CHRIST AND THE GRAVE. 263 

with equal footstep, she loved John Stuart Mill. 
So, naturally enough, an increashig and intelli- 
gent and unwasting love bound them together. 
She died ; and at once a light went out of the 
heart and life of the great thinker. " Since 
then," says Mr. Mill, "I have sought for such 
alleviation as ray state admitted of, by the mode 
of life which most enabled me to feel her still 
near me. I bought a cottage as close as possible 
to the place where she is buried, and there her 
daughter and I live constantly during a great 
portion of the year." I say it with reverence 
and with sadness, but what is that but the poor 
dog lying on his master's grave ? Not a word of 
brighter or better hope than that could John 
Stuart Mill's way of thinking let him say. 

No certainty of existence, of a richer life, of a 
grander destiny beyond. That grave ended 
everything; that grave was the end of every- 
thing. Into that grave they had put her he 
loved — not the body, not the external tabernacle 
in which she dwelt here, but her; as for any- 
thing beyond, he could know nothing; he could 



264 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

hope nothing. It knows much, it says ; it can 
talk learnedly about atoms fortuitously concours- 
iug; it can put force and law in the place of 
God ; it can scorn the Bible as a mass and mess 
of old wives' fables ; but this is where it brings 
you — this vaunting modern science of the 
material — to such sorrow as that dog had lying 
on its master's grave, and dying there itself, 
because it could not know but that they had laid 
him there — -the whole of him. 

But now^ there is a great and undeniable and 
historic fact which, if we will but see it, puts 
light and certainty and a divine and celestial 
sun on the other side that grave. For darkness 
there is radiance ; for death there is life. They 
hung Christ on that cross. They did it in the 
eyes of the assembled multitudes. It was no 
out of the way execution. Not alone did the 
Jews do it either. The Eomans had a hand in 
it. The Jewish Sanhedrim condemned, but the 
Koman Pilate executed. It was he who gave 
commandment, as publicly as official could, that 
he be crucified. They crashed the nails through 



CHRIST AND THE GRAVE. 265 

hands and feet. They thrust the spear-head into 
his inmost heart. He was dead ; there could be 
no doubt about it. He could not have swooned. 
He could not have been smitten with a syncope. 
No man ever lived with his heart cleft. The 
Roman soldiers certified his death. The Jewish 
rulers certified his death. Pilate, in the chair of 
the proconsul, certified his death. 

They put him in a sepulchre. It was no old 
tomb in which multitudes of dead had lain. It 
was not possible that another be mistaken for 
him. This Christ was that tomb's first and 
lonely occupant. It was a new tomb, in which 
never before had a dead body found a resting- 
place. 

They marked that tomb ; the disciples marked 
it with their love ; the Jewish Sanhedrim 
marked it with their hate ; the Roman govern- 
ment marked it with their watching. They rolled 
a great stone to that tomb's mouth. They sealed 
it with that Roman seal, to disturb which brought 
the disturber death. They set sentinels, pacing 

back and forth before that tomb. There could 
23 



266 ALONG THE PILGRIMAGE. 

be no mistake about it — that was the tomo. Into 
that tomb had he been carried who died upon 
that cross. It is not so certain that Napoleon 
was beaten at Waterloo as that this Christ was 
nailed to that cross, and was dead w^hen they 
took him down with a spear gash in his heart, 
and Avas placed in that new and sealed and 
guarded sepulchre. 

Wonderful the precautions which they took 
against possible mistake. All unwittingly, you 
say. True, God's hand was in it. He makes the 
wrath of man to praise him, the remainder he 
restrains. But if anything is historically certain, 
this is. Friends the most loving, enemies the 
bitterest, a government the most exact and 
mighty the world has seen, are its witnesses. 
Christ died on that cross. Christ was buried in 
that tomb. 

But that tomb could not hold him. That 
death could not maintain its manacles. The 
morning of the first day of the week is breaking. 
He rises. Death has had dominion, but death 
has now no more dominion over him. He rises 



CHRIST AND THE GRAVE. 267 

an utter and easy victor. There is no hurry. 
There is no evidence of strain, of struggle, 
and of conquest. The shroud in which they 
wrapped him is neatly folded and laid away. 
The napkin with which they had bound his head 
lies also in its special place. Calmly he is victor. 
And soon the news goes forth to his disciples, 
changing their sorrow into joy — changing our 
sorrow too, when death wraps itself about our 
own dead ; giving us the oil of joy for mourning, 
the garments of praise for the spirit of heaviness. 
He is risen ! He is risen ! 

This, then, is the revelation which the fact 
brings — that the grave is not the end, as the dog 
thought it, as the old pagan and much of our 
modern thinking bewails it ; but that the grave 
is only a passage ; that it opens lifeward on its 
thither side ; for Christ " hath brought life and 
immortality to light.'' 



THE END. 




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